PMorph: Origin
by LostCraft
Summary: In a London research facility, genetic engineer Andrew Sullivan succeeds in finding a way to inject fossil Pokémon DNA into a human host. The results, however, are not exactly what he had in mind, and all of a sudden he has a "Mix" to care for...
1. Chapter 1: Tabitha

**Pmorph Origin**

Disclaimer:

I do not own Pokémon, and I do not make any money from this work of fiction. All Pokémon names, references, the original "Silph Co" and "Pokémon technology" mentioned are essentially copyright © 1995 – 2009 Nintendo, Game Freak and Creature Labs.

I do, however, own the rights to this work of fiction, all original characters, and all deviations from the established canon.

Self-rated M due to minor and major graphical violence, implicit and explicit nudity, kills by major characters and undertones that be freaky. This might sound more drastic than it really is though, it's basically comic book violence.

Enjoy the story!

- Björn "Ghost" Ludwig

First draft written from July 21th, 2009 - September 18th, 2009

Last changes made January 11th, 2010

**Tabitha**

Doctor Andrew Sullivan liked to think of himself as an engineer, and in truth he was one. There was a difference between a job description and a way to see yourself, though. He was good at getting things done, in a slightly absentminded way, because he always paid attention to detail, just like a good engineer did. This had left him, over the years, with a keen eye and the ability to act quickly, both of which served him well when he entered a glum cell and was greeted by an angry hiss.

This wasn't unusual. Unfortunately, his job brought with it a lot of potential for being shouted, hissed, cried, and yelled at. Dr. Sullivan had developed a certain routine to deal with angry customers. But usually these were at the far end of a table, or even at the other side of a phone line. This one was with him in a small, padded cell, and the hiss was backed up by a fist flying towards him.

He ducked and pushed back, forcing the door shut behind him, and then moved to the side with a speed that was unusual for an elderly, rather podgy man. He heard a smack and a groan and turned around to see a very angry young woman rubbing her shoulder. She'd hit the padded door quite hard and glared angrily at him. He spread his hands.

"Please", he said, "Calm down. There is no need for violence. I am, in fact, here to help you. It's all a bit confusing, I know, but please believe me: No-one will harm you, and this is all not what it seems. You're not even in detention…" Her mocking stare made him stop and glance around. They were in a cell. Very _clearly_ a cell. His words were not too convincing as long as they were in a cell. He tried again.

"Let's just say that there was a slight misunderstanding, yes? You _are_ free to go, but I would like to _talk_ to you before. I have some interesting things to say, and they may probably, well, interest you."

"Sir, I came because your company sent me an invitation! You had this application thing on your website, and I filled it out and was asked to come here!"

"And as soon as you got to the gates you were brought here", nodded Sullivan, "And that's where our misunderstanding started, see?"

"You mean it's normal to have a cell in a…"

"Security rooms. We have a lot of security, so we have a lot of what may look like cells. We call them visitor's rooms. Harmless, really. You should see our toilets."

"I was locked in!" She was still leaning against the door, rubbing her shoulder. She looked both frightened and angry, which was a bad combination. Sullivan spoke quickly.

"Not exactly locked in. Okay. Listen. You have been invited into Silph Corporation. You have entered a complex where security is taken serious. Each visitor is brought here. First, you may know about these rumours that Silph houses a very large waste disposal for a lot of things that are toxic, radioactive and poisonous? Stuff that can go bang very easily?"

"Yeah, well, people always say something…"

"All true."

"Ah." The girl relaxed slightly. "O-kay."

"Second, this is a very large building where a lot of things happen behind closed doors. We like it that way, and we do not give anyone the big tour before we checked on them a little. The guard on duty is still new and a bit overenthusiastic. Well, that's all there is to say. I still need to apologise that no-one actually told you that you are, of course, our guest. Not our hostage. We don't take hostages, see, they tend to be high maintenance." He smiled drily.

"Okay. I think I understand", the girl said, apparently noticing his little joke.

"Splendid. I'm Dr. Sullivan, by the way, and you will work with me if you accept my apology and a job offer."

The girl burst into an exited smile. She looked much nicer when she smiled, and Sullivan felt all sorts of guilt well up in his stomach. He actually _wanted_ people to mistrust him a little. He felt better when he was sure that people would take everything he said with a pinch of salt, and probably mustard. The girl squared her shoulders and cocked her head.

"Just like that? There's no selection process or interview or something?"

"Wish there was, but no. You were the only applicant who qualified. In fact, you're the only one who found the "send" button. So yes, allow me to congratulate you on your new job, Miss Carlyle."

"Tabitha." She had completely changed within a few seconds; now she was all anticipation and excitement.

"So, Miss Carlyle, I've read your letter of application with great interest", said Dr. Sullivan as he lead the girl through the labyrinth that was Silph Corporation, "I must say that I was very impressed." And he was. Or rather, he _had_ been impressed for about two pages, and then had almost cried out of sheer disappointment.

Tabitha Carlyle was twenty-five years old but had quit school early, and her curriculum vitae read like a tour-de-force through half a dozen different jobs. Most of them involved machinery. She appeared to be a decent mechanic, that much could be said, but she had never been properly trained. She was lower middle class, she was in decent shape, and she seemed to get on well with people. All of this was useful. The tests that were part of the application also proved that she excelled in transferring knowledge. She was very, very good at adapting. To be honest, this was all Sullivan had been interested in. He needed someone who was good at being flexible, so this was a great bonus.

Flexibility alone, however, could not outweigh all the reasons that spoke against her. As he walked Tabitha through brightly lit corridors, occasionally exchanging a few words with a passing co-worker, he had a hard time deciding what to do with the girl. She seemed eager and easy to like, sure enough.

But- well, first, she was too young. That really was a minor point, but he considered it important. Being of age wasn't enough. There was the proverbial Anvil Of Life (with justified capitals, oh yes, since it was quite a big and very tough anvil) on which someone should be thoroughly beaten for a while, but Tabitha was… soft. She also was in a pretty mediocre physical shape- slight and petite, the kind of young woman you actually _called_ a girl without feeling bad about it. She hadn't listed any sports she regularly practised, only Yoga. Yoga!

And while she seemed to have a small gift for mechanics she was not exactly _bright_. Not exactly stupid, but rather streetwise than really… intelligent. And she appeared to be flighty. Not a cool thinker, an impulsive and naïve scatterbrain.

But Dr. Sullivan was aware that, due to the limits of his recruiting methods, he would never get the full package: The intelligent athlete with the perfect body and matching wonderful personality, mature yet youthful, flawless and brilliant and charming. He would _never_ get the Mary Sue. He would always get something like Tabitha Carlyle.

"What I'd like to know, Miss Carlyle, is what you think we are looking for."

"The application was for a research project. Stress and sleep withdrawal and all that."

"Yes, and you read the tests and filled them out. I bet you thought a _bit_ before you hit the send button. What do you think we're really up to?"

"Oh, that. I think you're going to test new medicaments", she said easily, "I mean, everyone knows Silph does that. Though no-one must say it loud."

Dr. Sullivan was impressed. He himself had written the tests, and the application itself _really_ asked for people able to stay awake for at least fifty hours. He had, however, hidden a lurking array of trapdoors in the tests. He could learn a lot about the person who was foolish enough to fill out several dozen apparently innocent questions. He'd also been quite sure that the test would fool even a very sharp thinker. Streetwise or not, the girl had common sense.

"Good guess", he said flatly, "How come you know about that?"

"I overheard someone in a pup I sometimes go. There's all sorts of gossip, you know. People even blog about Silph doing illegal tests to heal cancer and Alzheimer. And that you're working on a formula to make people live forever."

"That is an actual rumour?"

"One of a dozen." She chuckled. "But I bet some rumours are your own, right? Silph makes up some funny myths for everyone to read so that people are even more confused. And then you have a good laugh at them."

"Then tell me, what do you think your job will be?", asked Sullivan, ignoring that last comment because, heck, it was true.

"Oh, I don't know. You… are going to see how radiation works on me, something like that? Some super laser thing?"

"And you wouldn't mind?"

"Well, _are_ you going to point lasers at me?"

"Let's assume for a minute that we would do some even more radical things."

"Like what, using a very big laser? Two of them? What do you mean?"

"Miss Carlyle, what do you know about mutations?"

She barely shrugged.

"I know they are changes in the body, and I know that they take very long. You need years to get one right. Is that what you want, try to mutate something? Or someone? Me?"

"Again, would you mind?"

"I think not. I wouldn't be affected, would I? Mutation takes ages. Generations. And, well, you pay well, so I think it's okay."

"Ah. You're in for the money." Dr. Sullivan was, all of a sudden, a very depressed man. He waited for her answer and listened carefully if she was going to lie. A lie would get her out of the job faster than she could say "dollar, please".

"No", she said with disarming honesty, "It sounds silly, but do you know what I want? I want to help you. My mother had Alzheimer, you know, and it's not nice to see that happen to someone you love. She died. So if I can help Silph to make a formula against Alzheimer, or some other nasty disease, I really want to have my name in the credits."

"Hrmph", made Hank Sullivan, very pleased for the first time. She was speaking the truth. This was an answer to tip the scales, all right. If she could impress him one last time, she was in for sure, no matter how much he would need to throw his weight around. He was a senior, and he did _have_ some weight to throw around. He moved his lips silently, trying to find some words that would make him not sound like a fool.

"Since you happen to know some rumours, Miss Carlyle", he finally said, "Have you ever heard of pokemon?"

She stopped dead, and so did he. They were now deep in the basement, and all sorts of small, everyday noises- the air conditioning, the whirring of a small machine, someone closing a door- suddenly seemed all too loud. Tabitha ran her hands through her short, black hair and made a sucking noise through her teeth. But she didn't laugh.

"My grandmother used to tell me that one of her friends once found a strange animal. A dead one. An animal that wasn't like any animal he knew", she finally said, "And sometimes there are funny little stories floating around the internet. Fake photos and things."

"Fake indeed", said Dr. Sullivan and pointed at a door. It bore a small plaque which read "Samples". He made up his mind, opened the door, and entered the room.

"Want to see the real thing?", he called over his shoulder. With an unbelieving grin, Tabitha followed.


	2. Chapter 2: Not A Jellyfish

**Not A Jellyfish**

Tabitha was not sure what she had expected to see- or if she _had_ expected to see anything at all, actually. What the elderly doctor showed her, however, was clearly _not_ what she had expected.

As she entered the room she was surprised how large it was- a low but very long hall, with shelves stretching along the walls and a lot of sturdy white tables arranged into neat rows, all of it illuminated by cold neon lights. Dr. Sullivan guided her to one of the tables and then, with some care, placed a large plastic cylinder in front of her. It was filled with a crystal clear liquid in which a mostly transparent creature was floating.

"A jellyfish", she said, "Pretty large."

"Not exactly a jellyfish", said Dr. Sullivan, "Look closer, please."

Tabitha bent down and did so. A grin of pleased disbelief spread on her face. The creature _really_ looked a lot like a jellyfish- and then, it didn't. It was the size of a football, and the blue, gelatinous body was shaped almost like a helmet from which two long tentacles dangled like bootstraps. Three large, red balls were embedded in the gelatine like rubies in a wobbly jell-o dessert: Two at the temples, one centred in the forehead. And it had…real eyes, two almost human eyes, deeply set into the blue body. The iris was black. They were only half open, giving the creature a sleepy, slightly grumpy appearance.

"That is…", she breathed.

"A pokemon. A dead one, sadly. According to our documents it is called a Tentacool. It is in very many ways similar to our modern jellyfish, close enough to pass as one to a casual observer. But it is not a jellyfish. It is a type of pokemon."

Dr. Sullivan was very good at interpreting voices. He had had so much opportunity to study how people faked interest, tried to hide anger, fear, greed, or just tried to get the better of him, the latter with depressing regularity. When Tabitha spoke after a long pause, he was very pleased to find nothing but innocent joy in her voice. He started to like the girl.

"Wow", she breathed.

"Wow indeed."

"Where's it from?"

"Er, this one is from the Pacific Ocean. Some fishermen found it."

"It was _alive_?"

"No, it was already dead. It must've got trapped in their trawling nets. We never found a live one, and this one's our freshest."

"_This one_? There are more?"

"Silph Corporation owns seven Tentacool, in varying stages of decomposition. Worldwide, there are six more, but they belong to… private collectors. I daresay that they do not know what they own, though. They mistake them for freak mutations. This one here hardly had time to dissolve, we received it five years ago. Since then, no further specimen have been found."

"And _what_ is it?"

"I told you. It is a pokemon. An… animal, but one that is no longer part of our world. It's actually not too different from modern jellyfish. There's hardly anything in its body we do not understand- chemical reactions, cell structure, body functions, you know."

"Yeah, sure", mumbled Tabitha, who didn't.

"It's interesting, isn't it?"

"It's fascinating… Stupid name though. A bit too catchy to be true."

"We can only refer to some very old documents, but those indicate that pokemon were named after the sounds they made."

"Huh?"

"They were limited to one very distinct sound per species, and people used to name them accordingly."

"But that's… like calling a dog a woof because it goes _woof_!"

"Exactly. This species apparently went _tentacool_."

"That's silly!"

"Stranger things have happened", said Dr. Sullivan, who had occasionally thought the same. It reminded him of the word _kangaroo_, which meant, in the language of Australia's natives, "I do not understand you, stranger, and why are you so excited about that animal over there?"

"And are there others?"

"Excuse me?"

"Well, we have got cats and dogs and cows and birds and so on. How many types of pokemon were there?"

"A very good question! We have no idea." Dr. Sullivan was surprised how eagerly Tabitha took it all in. "Our records name about fifty different types of pokemon. Maybe there were more, even many more. But maybe there were less, and people mixed their own myths with real pokemon." He made a pause. "We have twenty."

Tabitha looked up from the small cylinder, her eyes sparkling. "I am so loving this place", she said.

"That's great, because if you accept the job, you'll spend a lot of time here."

"Don't you even dare to kick me out now!"

Not that I could, thought Dr. Sullivan- whatever the big chairs say now, you're in. Because now you've seen too much.

Andrew Sullivan made a big effort to get the maximum amount of information into Tabitha while getting the minimum amount of cheerful gasps out of her. He showed her three more pokemon Silph had secured and sealed in airtight containers: a large Goldeen (a big-eyed, horned fish resembling a koi carp), an Octillery (which looked very much like an octopus, if octopi were brightly orange and had muzzles) and the extremely decomposed, huge head of what appeared to be a water dragon. The name of this last pokemon was a mystery, there was no description in the records that matched it. Maybe it had been rare, or maybe it was too old to show up in the records. But it was a pokemon for sure.

"These are all water creatures", Tabitha said.

"These four, yes. There are others, and I will gladly allow you to see them all, but not yet. I think we should talk a bit about your job now."

"O-kay. I am very curious now."

Dr. Sullivan shrugged, a gesture he would constantly use in his working days with Tabitha. There seemed to be no way to surprise her. He sat down at the desk and tapped the cylinder with the little Tentacool in it.

"I am an engineer, you know? My title's doctor, but I am an engineer. Since I work for Silph Corporation, people usually think that means I build _machines_. I don't. I've never touched a screwdriver in my whole life. I am an engineer of genetics. I am part of a very small research facility. We are indeed trying to find… something, some way to improve life. We've been doing it for ages. We need to. Pollution's increasing, the ozone layer's leaking… there are hundreds of reasons to make things better. We didn't know how to do it, though. At first we thought that the best way would be to improve our existing machines, our technology, so that it wouldn't harm the environment any more. This was futile. Then we thought we could invent new machines to repair the damage that has already been done. This too was futile- and then eventually we realised that the key is genetics. Because when you can make it so that people don't get sick at all, you win time. That's what we want to do. The key is genetics, and the skeleton key is _changing_ genetics. We need to toughen up our good old DNA."

He spoke carefully and watched Tabitha closely, but the girl had just pulled up a chair and listened, all curiosity. She seemed to understand. Might as well go all the way then, he thought.

"It's something to do with the pokemon, yes?", she asked. Dr. Sullivan grinned.

"Something indeed. All of them seem to be designed to resist certain types of damage. That's because they are all attuned to the elements. Or better, they all very clearly belong to a certain element. There are fire-based pokemon. Animals that are somehow able to create and store fire in their bodies. Some have a skin that is flexible, but tough as stone. Some have an extremely robust digestive system. Some must've thrived on pollution."

"Based on elements?"

"Later. The important thing is, these creatures were tough. Extremely resistant, extremely durable. They were robust. And their DNA is still available to us. Well, some of it. And so I came up with an idea, and I am now going to tell you what that idea is."

"You want to breed them, don't you? You want to make them real again, like in that movie with the dinosaurs."

"No." He shook his head, grinning sadly, "That just wouldn't do. There seem to be a few pokemon around, even today, but they are dying out. Each time we find one I fear it will be the last. And recreating a living, complete animal, fully functional, that is very hard indeed. Never really works, just like in that movie", he chuckled, "with the dinosaurs."

"O-kay."

"Even if we had a living pokemon, we would still know almost nothing about them. It would be very hard to keep it alive, I fear. No, those few that still live should be left alone. But to steal from the DNA of the dead ones, that seems fair. It's also pretty hard, so the little buggers can be proud of all the work we invest into them..."

"So, you are going to look for the gene that says 'robust' and take it out… I am sounding stupid now, don't I?"

"No, no, many people think it works that way. Wish it were, but it's not that easy. There is no 'robust' gene, and you can not simply take a bit of DNA and glue it to another one, because the result would be either nothing at all or some bizarre growth or cancer."

"Like in that movie where the man swapped heads with a fly."

"Hah. You know what, yes, pretty much like that. Only that I do not plan to swap heads. I want to swap everything. I want to give a pokemon a piggyback ride on a human."

He must've used the exact right words- not technical but easy to understand and just the right amount of snazzy, because she looked at him in awe.

"You mean…"

"Yes, Miss Carlyle. I mean that I have created a method to infuse the DNA of a pokemon into a human host, and to make them one tandem being. I mean that I have invented a method to get a mutation the very fast way."


	3. Chapter 3: Sealed With Cupcake

**Sealed With Cupcake**

Two hours later Dr. Sullivan and Tabitha were in the Corporation's main cafeteria. The doctor had spend these two hours explaining things. Tabitha had spend them going wow a lot, but she had at no point laughed at Dr. Sullivan or called him mad.

The doctor mused if there was truth in the proverb that each new generation is harder to impress than the last one. He himself could remember his father talking about the first Blue Ray discs. His father's father, however, was there when the very first Compact Disc, the Blue Ray's forerunner, had been invented. Before that, music had been stored on magnetic tape in plastic cassettes that could be rewound with a _finger_. Andrew Sullivan had loved to hear about these primitive things from his grandfather, because he could see the development even then- from something simple that everyone could use and understand to something no-one understood at all, but still used on a daily basis. The more modern the machinery, the technology, the more it became a kind of magic, and after a while people thought that hot and cold water had been flowing out of taps in the walls forever.

Modern theories, wrapped up and then shot at Tabitha, definitely had to sound like magic to anyone who didn't understand the finer points of modern genetics. And she belonged to a generation that was all too eager to accept any explanation as long as it somehow seemed to make sense, no matter how far-fetched. If it came in a stylish enough wrapper, the kids would buy it. Silph Corporation made a lot of money just because this was the case.

"So basically you are paying me a lot of money for turning me into something else and then do a lot of tests", she summed up several centuries worth of research. Dr. Sullivan's academic brain cried murder. Still, Tabitha was basically right.

"Yes", he admitted, "But in a very scientific way."

"But… how can that work? Will I grow tentacles or turn blue?"

"That is… a bit hard to say. Let us get a coffee and a sandwich, and I will explain what you really have applied for, yes? After that, you are free to stay, but you're also free to go. And Silph Corporation will of course pay for your meal!", he hastily added as she was reaching into her pockets. She glanced at the long, shiny counter with its many trays, and he noticed her shy but hungry expression. Low pay, he thought. This must be food heaven. "Really, I mean it. Go nuts."

With today's special dish in front of them, the elderly engineer wrapped some extra information into short, simple sentences for People Who Didn't Do Genetics, At All. Tabitha enjoyed an enormous plate of lasagne and did her best to follow.

If she accepted the job, she would sign a very legal and very restrictive contract, basically signing over her body to Silph Corporation, for the duration of three years. Should the mutation work, she would stay at Silph for twelve full months, undergoing several tests, most of them rather basic, the rest extremely complicated, but none of them too harmful.

The payment would be twenty dollars a day. The doctor liked how the girl shrugged at the sum. There was something like total indifference about the financial aspect of the job. It was, he thought, hard to judge if it was much money. She would be selling her body to Silph- not the rights to the body but the right to be studied in detail. He was extra careful to explain that there would be very little private space, little room for decency. The only thing Silph Corporation would not be allowed to do was to kill her in cold blood. Sullivan pointed out that this sentence could be interpreted in several unfortunate ways, though he himself would be her supervisor, and he valued life very much. Tabitha shrugged some more.

After a duration of twelve months, she would be subjected to a regression, which was a simple name for the most complicated (and actually outstandingly painful) procedure known to any Silph engineer, and which allowed him to extract most of the pokemon genetics from her original DNA. Not everything, though, and again the doctor took great care to tell Tabitha that she would carry alien DNA inside her body for the rest of her life, and would not be allowed to have children, another detail in the very long contract.

She would mutate. Her body would S-H-I-F-T. She would be physically altered. She would no longer look totally human. She. Would. Change. Small changes, yes, but still changes. The idea was to keep things separated, but mixing was bound to happen. She would be a mixture of herself and whatever donator species she would turn out to be most compatible with.

"I can't choose?", asked the girl.

No, she couldn't. The research was limited to simple specimen, and of these, Silph Corporation had only very few. Most of them were insects and water-based creatures, but there were also some obscure pokemon with a totally alien shape. More complex creatures were too hard to splice. Strange, since the DNA of a mammal wasn't that much more complicated than that of, say, a bug. Technically it was simpler. But the rule of thumb was "The fewer legs, the harder to splice". And Silph Corporation strictly focussed on those pokemon that were restricted to one element and possessed strong resistances. Everything else would have been a waste of money. All in all, Sullivan was able to name ten potential donators, and was impressed how calm Tabitha remained all the time.

"Any catches you left out?" She spoke as if she didn't really care.

Several. First, she would, depending on her donator, require special treatment. That was the _Unknown_. Despite countless tests on rats, simians and living tissue it was impossible to say how the mutation process would affect her body. There was no telling how much, and how fast, she would change. Changes in rats and simians had been subtle, but always noticeable. Additional teeth. Change of colour. Unusual eating habits. Spontaneous combustion.

Sullivan closed with the fact that he considered the most suspicious one: "And should you die, actually die, Miss Carlyle, half of the payment for your participation in the project will be sent to your closest relative." There. Usually people ran away when they were fed that one. But Tabitha merely scraped the last bit of lasagne from her plate and chewed thoughtfully.

"And all this will help you to make this super-formula", she said (thankfully after swallowing), "That is a fact. It will help you to check my blood and see what colour my tentacles are, and how many there are and all."

"We don't even know if you will _have_ tentacles. You seem to have a thing about them."

"It sounds like a total fiction when you heard it without knowing that you have these creatures in your basement, you know?"

"Yes, I know."

"But I know you have them. I saw them. And so it sounds like an adventure to me. Risky and scary and strange and even useful. I'd feel like an idiot if I said no now."

"I'm glad you see it that way", said the engineer, who know she couldn't.

"I don't think I will get a year's leave from my job, though."

"That will not be an issue. You leave that to us."

"And when will we start?"

"Oh, we will need to do some checks first. Based on the _hidden test_ in my carefully crafted letter of application I know that you are compatible to the Staryu pokemon. We will need to see if you are compatible to more than one donator though. Make that a day, two at the most. Some health checks, too. If they go well, you will be given an injection the day after tomorrow. And then you will…"

"Yes, I know, please skip the warnings! I want to do this, doctor. I really want to! Please! I _want_ to do it!"

"That is what scares me a little."

"But why? Would it be better to force someone into it like some mad scientist?", Tabitha laughed, and the doctor grunted, taking some offence at the innocent joke.

"Let's just say that you are a bit too… trusting? I won't lie, I really enjoy your interest, but you must realise that you sound a bit to cheerful."

"Yes, okay, but that is because I trust you."

"I am not trustworthy, Miss Carlyle. I am not a friendly and trustworthy man. You should not let my honeyed syrupy tones fool you, you know?"

"That's me", she shrugged, "I had a reason to apply, and you gave me even more reasons. It's not my fault that I like what you're trying to do. So I am in, yes? I have your word for it? I will be very disappointed if you say no now. I'll cry and all."

She had, he noticed, remarkable eyes. She wasn't beautiful. But there was something in her eyes, a hungry look. _She longed for adventure_. He knew that phrase. His job was an interesting one, but even he sometimes longed to throw it all away, buy a little house somewhere and spend some more time with his wife and maybe learn to hang-glide. What he knew to be complicated science was a roller coaster ride of fun for Tabitha. And she really wanted to be part of it. He couldn't say no. Who knew if there'd ever be another applicant so eager and positive? In a way, she was the most unlikely Mary Sue he could have hoped for.

He also had no idea how long he would have to wait for another applicant if he chickened out now. He had no idea how compatible another applicant would be even to the Staryu, which was a simple, genetically boring creature. Right now, sitting in front of him and dripping tomato sauce from her chin, was a young and eager volunteer, who already knew most of the background story and had not been afraid, scared, or even insecure about the slightest detail. Sometimes life gave you lemons, and you went and made lemonade, and sometimes it gave you someone like Tabitha Carlyle, and you made, well, progress.

He made his decision. The tips of his moustache twitched as he smiled.

"Welcome aboard, Miss Carlyle. Shall we seal the deal with a cupcake?"


	4. Chapter 4: I Chose You

**I Choose You**

Three days passed. Tabitha hardly noticed. The door to the storage room where she'd been shown the Tentacool was only one of many doors. Dr. Andrew Sullivan opened them all for her, and behind them, she found wonders. Within a very short time she learned almost anything about pokemon there was to know. It wasn't much, but it was exciting.

Once pokemon had been everywhere. Really everywhere: There had been bird pokemon and water pokemon, land pokemon and even some that were plants. They had been the flora and the fauna of the planet, living side by side with the humans of that time. None of the animals people knew today had existed then. Pokemon had been the animals of that time. It had been a totally different world.

But once you looked past the strange looks, pokemon really _were_ animals. They lived in the wild, they got born, hunted and ate, they made some more pokemon, and then they got eaten, or simply died. They were part of just another ecosystem. Humans had domesticated some of them, the records told, for meat, milk, silk and occasionally for company- some pokemon had made good pets, just like cats and dogs and hamsters.

Dr. Sullivan thought that pokemon were the forefathers of today's animals, since they looked so very similar to them in many cases. Tabitha silently thought that this made sense, and then wondered if a Caterpie, which looked so much like a caterpillar, had once been able to turn into some sort of cocoon, and then a butterfly. It would make sense.

Why they had disappeared- or almost disappeared- was a mystery. Pokemon were like dinosaurs: Both a reality and a myth, and now gone. The few corpses that were found hinted that somewhere a few still fought for a niche in an ecosystem that no longer had room for them. They were doomed, driven away by humans and their modern ways. Tabitha couldn't help but feel a bit sad for them.

Silph Corporation owned twenty different types, seven of them unidentified. Before he showed her into a guest room for the night, Dr. Sullivan gave her a ledger that held all the information about them, and told her to read it carefully. She did, and dreamt of fire-dogs and jellyfish, of dancing foxes and of little flower-gnomes running around the forests, gleefully chasing vegetarians.

She'd severed ties to her outside life easily- there weren't too many friends worth speaking of (or even to), and Silph had taken care of her job. Silph had also taken care that she was interviewed by three people with very serious expressions, scanned, smeared with goo and then toasted in a tube, pricked into the fingers and finally declared the first applicant to the Mix project. She really didn't care too much about these tests- she was sure that they were a mere formality- but she _was_ a bit disappointed that this project had such a bland name.

And ever so often, Dr. Sullivan had approached her, asked her a few things and had then wanted to know if she was still sure she wanted to do this all. He seemed really worried that she was signing into something she didn't understand. But she did understand. She just saw the science behind it from a different point of view.

Tabitha knew very well that she wasn't exactly a child prodigy. She lived a normal and slightly boring life and, when all was said and done, dreamt a lot. One of her strongest dreams had started when she'd been a child, raised by ordinary lower-middle-class parents who'd been remarkable in no way at all, but who had loved her a lot and who she had loved back a lot, too. Let's pretend, she had cried so often, let's pretend I am a cat. Or a bat. Or a fish, oh, she had loved pretending to live in the deepest seas.

For Tabitha, the strange Mix project sounded like a gift-wrapped instant wish from a genie in a bottle. She eventually managed to make Dr. Sullivan see her point, and this was the start of a good understanding. She was proud of that. And then three days had passed.

The last morning of her life as a normal human being (as she thought of it) was quite possibly warm, sunny and only slightly spoiled by the eternal smog of the city. She _imagined_ it to be sunny and cheerful and couldn't check anyway because she was in a room twenty feet under ground, so windows were out of question. Tabitha made her way up to the large and airy main cafeteria, feeling very much at home now in the huge and crowded complex of Silph Corporation. She cheerfully waved at the guard by the side of the cafeteria's door, entered and sighed happily. She _liked_ this place. Tasteful, light, all creamy white and sandy yellow, and always, always crowded. Tabitha helped herself to a plate of scrambled egg and bacon, a huge cup of coffee, and allowed the man behind the counter to scan her visitor's tag and deduct the breakfast from her future payment cheques. She sat down by herself, as she always did, and finally enjoyed the pale sunlight flooding through the large windows.

"Good morning, Miss Carlyle!" She looked up and smiled. Dr. Sullivan had entered the cafeteria and now approached her table. There were red rings under his eyes, and he hadn't shaved. He looked at her with mild disapprove that would, she knew, not last very long at all.

"You really are too much, Miss Carlyle", he said. He often did. She knew him by now and was much better at understanding his lead-ins to complicated jokes, so she merely smiled and tilted her head.

"You will now tell me why, I bet. In very many words."

"Six!", he exclaimed and threw some flimsies at her.

"Six words?"

"Six possible donator species. You must be the most compatible lucky woman in the whole city. Have you ever been abducted and probed by aliens? That would explain your unhealthy obsession with tentacles."

"I don't do aliens."

"You are much more than one old man could've hoped for. Being compatible to the Staryu pokemon made me accept your application, of course. Plus the fact that you were the only applicant. But now it turns out that we really can choose- from six donators, and no less. I should buy you some cake."

"I got my own tag by now, Dr. Sullivan. So, you mean there are six pokemon I can… mix with?"

"No, you only get to mix with _one_. Everything else would be an orgy, and we don't do orgies. They are unhealthy and far too Freudian."

"Ah." She didn't even blink. Dr. Sullivan liked to misunderstand her, or better: He liked to show her that she spoke a bit too careless by deliberately twisting her sentences. According to some people she'd met and talked to, this was his way to show how much he _enjoyed_ working with somebody. He didn't have the patience to fire puns at people he disliked.

He browsed through his flimsies and cleared his throat. Tabitha prepared for the _long_ explanations he liked so much. But she'd rubbed off on him a bit too, and he had learned when Brief Was Best.

"There they are", he said and handed her six printouts: Computer images of pokemon, carefully reconstructed from their corpses and additional descriptions from the records.

"My wife is making these", the doctor explained, "She tries to show them in their natural habitat too. I think she does a very good job."

Tabitha was already good enough at pokemon lore that she didn't need to ask their names. It was even possible to sing them, they were so catchy. She hoped for only one image as she flipped through the pages.

Caterpie. A worm, a caterpillar- bright green and yellow, with big doleful eyes.

Oddish. A knobbly, almost spherical little creature with leaves instead of hair, and with two tiny, stubby legs.

Staryu- really just a starfish, with a shiny red orb embedded in the centre of five strong arms.

Ariados. Very much like a spider, with a sharp horn and six legs, two of them at its back.

Goldeen, the koi-carp, cool eyes and a big pout giving it the expression of an elegant lady in an elaborate ballroom gown.

She flipped to the last page and was disappointed that there wasn't any blue on it.

An unnamed pokemon. A stocky, mostly brown bird with a short beak. It looked a bit like a pigeon.

She sighed. She had really hoped the little jellyfish would match her, without any reason apart from it being the first pokemon she'd ever seen. She'd really liked it, in a strange way she could not explain. It had been the first time she'd seen a legend.

"No", Dr. Sullivan said as if he'd read her mind, "the Tentacool isn't compatible. Not even close to 40 percent, that really would be too much of a risk." He made a small pause, then he surprised her by saying, "I want you to choose, Miss Carlyle."

"What? No! I am not the expert, that's your job! You must tell me which one is the most useful to study!"

The man raised his eyebrows in genuine surprise, as if this was the first really scientific statement he'd heard in a long time. He didn't say anything for a while. Then he slowly fanned out the pages in front of her. He cleared his throat.

"_All_ of them are interesting", he said, "They all represent their types very strongly, and they all are simple enough to Mix easily. It doesn't matter _too_ much which one we use. We can get something good from all of them." He tugged at his moustache and drummed his fingers on the table. "However, and that is just a suggestion, Miss Carlyle, really… I would advise against the Oddish. It's a plant. A bit like a mandrake. That is very radical, mixing plant DNA with human genes. And the bird pokemon is the least interesting of the whole bunch. Birds are pretty much flying rats, and their immune system is good, but that's about all we could learn. London's got a surplus of pigeons already. It's also the one donator you are the least compatible with, at only 78 percent. Which still is a lot."

"Then which one is the best, in percent?"

"Hmm…. these two here are a tie. The Ariados and the Goldeen. You're at 94.3 percent with both of them. That is a lot. Even higher than we thought would be possible."

"So I am compatible with _a spider and a fish_?"

"It's a funny old world", shrugged the doctor. "Both of them are pretty interesting. Some spiders can grow back their legs, and their internal workings are downright fascinating. Good metabolism, very tough. And the Goldeen, if it is anything like our koi, should at least be immune to cancer. That's useful, that."

She looked at the two printouts. Tabitha was okay with spiders, and the Ariados didn't look too gross- a black-and-red, shiny body with beige-and-purple striped legs. The reconstructed image showed it crouching on a tree stump- it was the size of a sheepdog. The Goldeen was slightly smaller, and it was a fish. She loved fishes, but something about its elegant, _girly_ looks annoyed Tabitha. She'd hate to end up looking like some sort of underwater fairytale queen that always seemed to prance. That wasn't her.

She looked at the man who would change her into something else, and decided that this was _her_ moment, and that she could add any drama she wanted. She tapped one page.

"Ariados", she said, "I choose you." It actually sounded terribly flat.


	5. Chapter 5: The Cool Assistant

**The Cool Assistant**

A hectic morning rushed by, punctuated by people. Really punctuated: Tabitha got the feeling that all of a sudden she met a lot of strangers, one every exact four minutes, and each of them did his best to confuse her. In the end she knew a group of seven men and two women that she later learned was most of the Pokemon Research Trust.

Like many very intelligent people who spent a lot of their time studying they instantly assumed that she, Tabitha, would be interested in everything they talked about, and also that she'd be just as clever and well-read as them. Hilarity ensued. Tabitha was quite glad when they eventually left.

"That", she said, when she and Dr. Sullivan were alone and made their way to the laboratory where the fun part was to begin in a short while, "were lore keepers, right?"

"A nice description", smiled the man.

"I thought it up myself."

"Well done. Yes, these ladies and gentlemen are keepers of lore, sure enough. There isn't very much lore to keep, though. They will talk to you a lot after your Mix. And when they do, please remember that they are desperate for facts. Even small ones will do. Try to feed them something, otherwise they will start to make things up. If you can't think of anything, just tell them you ate a fly or, I don't know, maybe that you started knitting."

They walked a while through an almost endless corridor, doors and more corridors branching left and right. Corridors were prominent here, zigzagging into all directions, sometimes at cross purposes. Both of them wondered how far they went. Eventually they entered an elevator that required Dr. Sullivan's security pass.

"We're going down now. My laboratory is underground. Once you have been Mixed, however, we will return to the upper basements. You will be shielded from public for a while. Have you said every goodbye you need to?"

"There weren't too many. Come on now, Dr. Sullivan, let's get this started!"

The laboratory didn't look scary at all. Tabitha, imagination running wild, had thought there would be a lot of weird old machines and monkeys in cages. There weren't. The laboratory was just a spare room that at one point had been filled with computers, refrigerators and a few working tables. The room was a mess, but it was a scientist's mess, papers and compact discs strewn everywhere, several plasma monitors displaying colourful diagrams, the odd mouldy sandwich sticking out of a heap of files. In one corner a field bed had been expertly put together. Tabitha understood that Dr. Sullivan lived his job to the maximum and felt a pang of sympathy for the man. Well, he _was_ easy to like.

In the centre of an adjacent room stood a chair that was clearly more than just a thing to sit in. It had power plugs and straps and was screwed firmly to the ground. A lot of cables ran into an array of screens and scanners.

"This is the chair where you will be horribly violated", Sullivan explained, "And this- he pointed to the screens- is where we _record_ you being violated so that we can sell the footage to the highest bidder."

"Yeah", said a voice and gave Tabitha a start, "Scary movies." She turned around.

A young man had entered the laboratory. He wore torn jeans and a faded black shirt, but also a lab coat with the sleeves rolled up, so he probably was a scientist too. His dark eyes took her in, and he gave her a friendly smile. He stood slightly stooped, and as he came over, she noticed that he limped.

"I'm Pete Myers. Pleased to meet you." He noticed her expression and knocked against his shin. "Screws. Got savaged by a dog. Brutally so", he grinned sheepishly.

"Pete has been my assistant for several years, until he decided to make his fortune somewhere else. He came back, however, when I told him that we would perform the first Mix today", Dr. Sullivan explained.

"Very exciting, that. I couldn't resist", said the young man and shook hands with her, "That is, if you don't mind. Dr. Sullivan made it clear that you have a voice in that. I've build most of the chair, by the way. It doesn't do nasty things."

Tabitha instantly liked him, in a non-committing way. He couldn't be that much older than herself, and he seemed more outdoors than many of the staff. She dubbed him The Cool Assistant. Wow. Who'd have thought that you could have cool scientists? He even had a goatee.

"Pete will be a great help. He already did a good deal of field research for me. It was him who found the Ariados pokemon we are going to Mix you with. The actual specimen."

"Wait… the poke-spider?", said Pete, "Wow. I thought you'd go for something simpler!"

"You know the rule, Pete, the more legs, the easier to splice."

"What about the Caterpie one, then? Most legs I ever saw."

"Can't stand worms."

"I _want_ to be mixed with the Ariados", added Tabitha, "It sounds interesting, and Dr. Sullivan is sure it will make a good study."

"What are the odds?", Pete wanted to know.

"She's compatible to six donator species, Pete, and the compatibility to the Ariados is close to 95 percent. You also have no word in this because Miss Carlyle has made a decision I fully support, and also because I already have created the Mix. That stuff is expensive, and I hate to fill out all the legal forms."

"Ugh, yeah, they are hell on earth", Pete conceded. He stood there with his hands in his pockets for a while. Then he and Tabitha spoke as one: "When do we start?"

"And do not ask me again if I really want to do this", the girl added. Dr. Sullivan took a thermos bottle from a small refrigerator and opened it. With some ceremony he took a short tube from the thermos and gave it a gentle shake. The liquid in it had a bright yellow hue. He felt no urge to make a long speech at all, he realised. Tabitha's eagerness was almost contagious, and he really wanted to see his work in action.

"You are right", he said, "Let us call a nurse and do this."

"The best thing you ever said!", smiled Tabitha.

"Oh man, that was the stupidest idea I ever had", whispered Tabitha and shifted uncomfortably in the chair. She realised that the chair _itself_ was comfortable, were it not for the fact that a) she was naked, b) three people watched her being naked and c) all of these people, not to flog a dead horse here, were fully dressed, while she wasn't because, well, she was naked.

An old plainclothes nurse stood beside her and mustered her coolly over the rims of her spectacles. She reminded Tabitha of her math teacher, as nurses often do, and she held a very large syringe containing the Mix. The purpose of the syringe was to put the Mix _into_ Tabitha and start her mutation, but right now it seemed to be mostly there to scare the hell _out_ of her.

"Are you having second thoughts, Miss Carlyle, _any_ second thoughts?", Dr. Sullivan asked once more. Somehow this calmed her down. She scolded herself for being nervous. The man was kind and concerned and offered her to step back even now. That really made it clear that this was no sick, pervert game. She wasn't even strapped into the chair. The doctor was playing fair, the Cool Assistant was calmly adjusting his cameras, the nurse was icy but polite. This was it- her magical mystery tour. If it all worked, there could be a new cure for something in a while, or maybe even something better. And what was the worst that could happen? Would she become strange? The Ariados had looked alien, yes, but also fascinating and elegant in its strangeness. It didn't even have icky hairy legs, just smooth chitin in funny colours. Would she grow extra legs? She doubted it, she'd been told that the changes were usually very subtle. Maybe there would be tiny changes. Something. And if she ended up with extra legs, would that be too high a price to pay for an adventure?

Oh. Wait!

"What about speech?", she cried out, "I _will_ still be able to speak, will I? I won't go _ariados_ all the time? Because that would be really very silly!"

"We did tests with rats and primates, and they all retained their sound patterns. Isn't that so, Pete? We did the first batch together, remember?"

"One of the rats started to _pronounce_ its squeaks, right, when we mixed it with the Oddish. And it seemed to like sunlight a lot, but that's about all I ever noticed."

"We still have that rat somewhere, I think."

"Should be pretty old by now."

"It just would be really silly, you know?", Tabitha said weakly.

"You won't go _ariados_ all the time, no way", Pete said confidently. Then his senior took over and stared at the girl with a mixture of concern and hope and, yes, longing to see his invention in action.

"Miss Carlyle, we are all set up. I am, from now on, your supervisor. I am directly responsible for you. For your health and your well-being, is that understood? I would hate to have you think of me as a mad scientist at any point of our voyage. So I ask you once again, before the nurse next to you will inject you with a large dose of not-quite-legal mutagen: Are you really sure about this?"

He wasn't mocking her, he really wanted her to be safe and well. He wanted her to change so that his studies could begin, yes, but he was so very polite and careful. She had to smile, there was no helping it, and she wasn't afraid anymore.

"I am very sure that I do want to do this", she said, trying to mock his complicated grammar. He actually smiled back.

"You surely have prepared some snazzy little catchphrase? Fire away, Miss Carlyle." He nodded at the nurse, who'd been holding the syringe with icy patience because that was the one thing she was paid to do.

"Last one to mutate buys a round of beer", mumbled Tabitha.

The nurse looked at her with all signs of disapproval, then she turned towards the doctor with all signs of respect. She lifted the syringe. Tabitha nodded, and so did Andrew Sullivan, a fraction later.

He'd actually waited for that last sign of confirmation.

"Well then, let's get the freak show started!", chuckled the Cool Assistant.

The needle pierced the skin of her belly.


	6. Chapter 6: Crackle, Snap, Pop

**Crackle, Snap, Pop**

What Tabitha felt was… an overall tickling sensation, as if someone ran a feather along the length of her spine, tickled the soles of her feet and blew into her ears. It wasn't exactly painful, but extremely uncomfortable. She knew that the serum inside her now spread through her body, hitting every cell as quickly as possible. She felt warm inside. It was like being flushed with warm alcohol.

Then her stomach began to heave, and her cheeks turned a sick shade of green. The nurse gave her a plastic smile as she burped.

"Nervous, dear?"

"I am naked, clueless, and will soon mutate", mumbled Tabitha, fighting nausea, "And I hate being called dear. But no, I'm not very nervous."

"Very well then", the woman snapped.

"Some of the primates threw up during the tests", Pete called over, "It's okay, we can easily clean the chair."

"No, I feel perfectly fine…", insisted Tabitha, then, point being made, she threw up. She felt dizzy, and all of a sudden her head was aching. She felt sweat on her brow. Dr. Sullivan, always in her view, made a short gesture, and the nurse nodded and wiped Tabitha's forehead with a damp, cool cloth. Pete carefully adjusted his cameras a little and then raised his head in surprise. Tabitha's pulse and heartbeat were speeding up.

"Doc? She's already accelerating."

Tabitha gasped. There was a long series of drawn-out, cracking sounds. The origin of these sounds was her body. She looked down at her chest and went a good deal paler.

"Speak up, Miss Carlyle", said the nurse, all cool and calm, "Describe the process as you experience it. It's helpful."

"You… are… filming me already… aren't you?"

Someone touched her shoulder, and she felt her bones tingle. Andrew Sullivan, his hands in surgeon's gloves, once again was an anchor.

"Everything okay?", he asked. She looked up at him and grinned. She didn't dare to fail the man.

"My ribs are… aching..."

"Can you breathe? Your chest is moving very erratically."

"All's o-kay", she panted, "Just a bit… short of… breath. My head's spinning… Nothing else." But in truth she felt really bad, and was really afraid.

"This is strange", said Pete. He tapped his monitors. "This is… really strange."

"What is?", asked Sullivan, not looking up.

"Well… everything, really. Doc, it already starts! And no small changes either! Her lungs are splitting."

Dr. Sullivan furrowed his impressive brows.

"Splitting?"

"Spiders have four lungs. Well, the larger ones have", Pete said. He's really cool about this, Tabitha thought. Then she threw up some more.

"Oh shit, yes, four lungs. And… oh man…" Pete looked over to her, his face alarmed. He swallowed hard. "Doc, there's rapid tissue growth. All over the place, this is… Kiddo, this is going to _hurt_."

_-crackle! _

Tabitha cried out. Dr. Sullivan had politely called her petite- her frame was slight, and she wasn't too well-endowed in the bosom department either. That made it all the easier to watch her ribcage shift, slimming down by a good two inches. Sharp, angular motions happened under her skin. And then, with the girl's scream growing thinner and more insistent, the Mix went into a burst. Both scientists would later have to watch the recording of the transformation in slow motion, several times, to describe it in fullness.

_-snap!_

Tabitha was thrust forward as two long, slim limbs broke through the skin of her back. There was very little blood, but a sharp snap as two chitin-covered spider legs, a distinct beige-and-purple stripe pattern, emerged from just beneath the girl's shoulder blades, almost propelling her out of the chair. They were not small. They were as long as her arms. Smaller patches of chitin grew around them, forming what looked like natural armour on Tabitha's shoulders. A sticky goo dripped from her skin: Chitin welled up and encased her arms from the elbow to the wrist, pale grey first, then developing the striped, beige and purple pattern of the Ariados donator's limbs. Within seconds those parts of Tabitha's skin that still deserved the name took on a dull, dark grey hue. She felt a sharp pain in the small of her back.

This had taken, they later wrote down, three-minutes-dot-fourteen-seconds. Wincing and trembling the girl slumped back into the chair, the spider-limbs settling neatly behind her. There was a faint rustling sound as the chitin hardened on her body.

"She's losing bones", Pete called out.

"You mean calcium?"

"No, actual bones. Spiders have an exoskeleton, right?"

"This can't be", breathed Sullivan, "When you add two things up you gain, you don't lose. No test subject ever degenerated. We suspected there would be some additional _growth_, but…"

Tabitha lifted a chitin-encased arm and watched her hand. She saw it twitch. There was something happening under the skin of the back of her hands… She remembered the Ariados picture, all its legs ending in pointed claws. She was afraid. She was very, very afraid. Would she lose her hands?

"She's going for another burst", said Pete desperately. Tabitha gave a feeble sigh and did just that.

_-pop!_

This one lasted a mere twenty-four seconds. Chitin formed on the back of her hands, shaping into curved, pointed plating that reached over her fingers like the sleeves of an overlarge pullover. She turned them around quickly. Her hands were still there, but…

"Three fingers", she mumbled.

"What?"

With a sharp pop her waist narrowed slightly, and her kneecaps seemed to explode outwards into smooth discs of chitin. Her legs changed, mirroring the transformation of her arms, with some extra sharp popping sounds as the chitin had to allow for more joints than a spider could ever dream to have. Broad stripes of red formed a symmetrical pattern on her chest and her throat.

"Bones?", Sullivan rasped.

"Most of them in place. Shins are thinning a bit, but there's enough exoskeleton to support her…"

"I do have second thoughts now, Doctor", whispered Tabitha.

"Too late for that, Miss Carlyle. I am sorry."

"Never mind." She grinned sickly.

"Another burst."

"Pete, there's nothing _left_ of her to change!" Sullivan was totally out of his depths here.

"Well check my scanner and call me a liar, then! Oh, no… Lady, do not stick your tongue out!"

This time, Tabitha wanted to stay on top of it. She gripped the arms of the chair, pressed herself back and gritted her teeth. Held her breath and waited for another painful burst- that somehow didn't come. Then the skin of her skull seemed to crawl up her temples. She felt an odd- not even painful, just odd- pressure.

"What the…" she began.

_-rustle!_

The scientists later timed the third and final burst at two-minutes-dot-ten-seconds. During these two minutes, the hair of the girl grew by almost six inches and took on a rich, oily shine. Her face narrowed a bit, the chin became more pointed, and chitin plating appeared at her temples, this time curved to follow the contours of her skull. A small, ebony white horn slowly emerged from the centre of her forehead, parting her fringe. Two curved, equally white shapes lazily spread away from just below her ears.

"Mandibles…"

"More like tusks. Er. Under-the-ear-tusks… things."

"Must be mandibles. The Ariados isn't even related to anything resembling an elephant."

"Are we sure of that?"

"Yes, because there is no elephant-y pokemon in the records."

"Ah, that seals it. Mandibles, then."

"Actually they are called pinchers, aren't they?"

"I am calling them mandibles from now on. I am sure I outrank them."

The fangs or pincers or mandibles or whatever snapped together, rattling her teeth, then nestled against the curves of Tabitha's cheeks, tips almost touching the corners of her mouth. Eyes closed, the girl waited in dreadful anticipation. Nobody spoke a word, and for a while there was only the gentle whirring of the equipment and Tabitha's exhausted gasps. Then she very slowly raised her head and blinked some tears away.

"That", she said with a tinny echo to her voice, "was dreadful."


	7. Chapter 7: Cooling Down

**Cooling Down**

One remarkable thing about scientists is their need to analyse every little thing they see. And since every scientist is always sure that _his_ view on things is the only one there is, two scientists in one room are an instant argument. They are capable of having a discussion about the nature of tornadoes while being swept away by one.

Dr. Andrew Sullivan and Pete Myers knew about this unwritten law and had, very early in their career, found ways to work around it. The fact that their individual fields of research were just different enough had helped a lot. The doctor dealt with the very small things, the genetics. The assistant dealt with the end result of genetics, the animals. Or pokemon, in his case. But mostly they were friends who'd gone a long way. That counted for a lot.

The laboratory was filled with tiny sounds that seemed far too loud. Sullivan tapped his pencil against his teeth, a dead giveaway how angry he was. Myers busied himself with his recorders, saving the data and dutifully making backups for the rest of their small and select group. The nurse did all sorts of nursery things to Tabitha, who sat slumped in her chair and slowly recovered her breath.

"This", Dr. Sullivan said after a while, "was really not supposed to happen at all." He leaned on a desk, hunched, clearly shaken.

"A very neat Mix, though", said Pete from his workstation, speaking carefully but a good deal more optimistic, "No, really. Very symmetrical. That is _good_. Symmetry is a sign of a functional body."

"This isn't a Mix at all! This is almost a complete transformation!"

"Doctor, you invented this. We all knew there would be changes. We saw them happen in the tests, there was always something…"

"Something! _Some_ thing, yes. Small, vestigial and irregular changes. A freak leg, change in colour, some odd traits…"

"I don't really feel bad, you know", said Tabitha weakly from under a cool, damp cloth the nurse had placed on her forehead, almost spiking it on her horn. The cold water felt good.

"It must be something with that very high compatibility", the doctor mused, "There is something here that wasn't a factor in the earlier tests."

"Does that matter now, Doc?", Pete asked and walked over to his senior, "Look at the lady…"

"Will you please start using her name, Pete!"

"Tabitha, sorry, yes…"

"Call me Tabby."

"Tabby, thank you, is a _healthy_ mutation, Doc. Look at her! Everything in place, everything working. The Ariados Mix changed her, yes. Okay. Changed her completely. The Mix has tried to remake her into something as close to the original pokemon as possible, right? But she is still roughly human-shaped, she hasn't lost any limbs…"

"I got three fingers. Oh. Toes, too."

"This means trouble", said Andrew Sullivan, "This means two unique kinds of trouble."

"Nonsense", snapped the nurse, "It will wear off, naturally, and she did sign a contract after all. It's not that anything illegal has happened. You yourself warned her several times!"

"Thank you for contributing, Mrs. Joy, but what makes you think that the Mix will wear off?", the elderly engineer snapped back. It was the first time he spoke in anything but a calm, maybe mocking tone, and Tabitha twitched at the sound. So did the nurse.

"It won't?", she said, taken aback. Andrew Sullivan sighed and sat on the table. He longed for a cup of strong tea. Pete caught his desperate glance and limped away to boil some water.

"Mrs. Joy, I understand that you came here on short notice. I am glad to have you here. You are doing a wonderful job. I am really glad to have you on the team and would like to congratulate you on your very professional approach and a possible future pay rise. But please allow me to tell you that a mutation, as the name actually somehow indicates, is _permanent_. It is not some temporary masquerade. We have found a way to remove a great deal of changes from a partially mutated body, yes. But this isn't possible after a full transformation. Such a radical change is permanent, right, as in _lasting forever_. I can spell it out in Latin if you like. It'll sound much more impressive then."

"He always talks like that", Tabitha offered. The nurse took a step back.

"I've been sent as a service nurse, Doctor. This wasn't supposed to be permanent."

"It is now. Welcome, Mrs. Joy, to the wonderful world of mixed genetics", said Pete happily, "Tea? It's gunpowder. The perfect geek drink."

"I'm getting up now", Tabitha decided. She tested her feet and then carefully pushed herself up.

"Thank you, Pete." Sullivan clutched the cup of tea like a lifesaver. "Now, back to the trouble I mentioned. Listen up, everybody, because this is some very big cock-up. I admit that it is quite possibly all my fault. Okay, first…"

"Irreversibility", said Pete, "We won't be able to change Tabby back. Removing anything now will leave her crippled, or even dead."

"Yes. That, however, means we no longer have a contract because _technically_ we already broke it. All sort of legal things will happen, and we all now what that means."

"Hilarity ensues", said Pete, not very happy. He shared Dr. Sullivan's view on money and superiors in many ways.

"And finally, all our previous tests are rendered worthless. We can't even predict if Miss Carlyle won't develop any further traits of the Ariados donator."

The nurse stared at the men, dumbfounded and slightly disgusted. She'd been working for Silph Corporation for ten years now, and she took some pride in her work. She was a good nurse, but she wasn't, her strict bun and stern expression made very clear, a babysitter. And that last remark had just been a bit too much.

"You can't possibly mean…", she started, her harsh voice suddenly brittle.

"Could happen indeed", Pete mused, "Changes in diet, territorial behaviour… Could be anything. Also, the Ariados might not be totally like our spiders."

"She will… stay that way?", the nurse repeated. She squared her shoulders. She didn't go on well with what she called _youngsters_. She didn't go on well with people of her age, either. She also hated spiders. They gave her the creeps. She managed to heap disgust on each word. Dr. Sullivan watched her with equally obvious animosity.

"It seems so, yes", he snapped, "Is that a problem, Mrs. Joy?"

The woman managed to return his stare for a couple of seconds. The icy silence was broken by a happy little chuckle. Tabitha had squatted down, her additional legs bending over her shoulders, swaying gently as she turned her head and looked up at them.

"You are all silly", she said, "Man, you really are! You stand there and argue and sound so disappointed! Look!" She pushed herself up, her back legs settling down at her sides, and walked towards the stunned doctor. Chitin clicked on the tiled floor, punctuating each step- hesitant at first, but she kept her balance and finally stood in front of Andrew Sullivan, the man who had mixed her up. She grinned at him from behind a curtain of smooth black hair.

"I am totally okay!", she said, "You should be proud! This is what you needed, isn't it?" She leaned forward. She wanted the man to be proud about his success. She wanted him to feel the excitement of being alive and strange. She really didn't want him to be upset. That would be totally wrong. "You wanted", she said, slowly, "to look at an Ariados to see how they are all robust and strong. Now you have that. Doctor Sullivan, I'm good. Everything works, and I feel good, okay? Can you please be a bit happy? If there is something wrong you got a lot of time to sulk about that later."

Pete Myers and the icy nurse Mrs. Joy didn't know Tabitha for very long, and stared at her in disbelief. Dr. Sullivan, however, realised that the girl really was seeing this as some sort of adventure- the fact that her genes just had been mixed beyond recognition meant little to her. And he just knew that Tabitha wouldn't fake this cheerful innocence. She wouldn't see the point; why fake something she owned in so large amounts? And if she could be okay with the unexpected result of the Mix… well, then _he_ should be able to accept it, too. He nodded, gratefully. Seeing a feeble smile appear under his moustache did Tabitha a spell of good.

"And you really are okay, yes? Don't you lie now!", he warned.

"I am o-key-do-key, yes", she said. "But I want a bath. Oh, I want a bath. And a sandwich. A _large_ sandwich. And a hug. I am not hairy or icky, I want a hug." She spread her arms. Her back legs mimicked the gesture. But Dr. Sullivan didn't even hesitate to give her the hug she wanted.

It didn't feel all too strange, he thought.

Of course Tabitha had lied: She was still aching all over. You can't have a lot of your anatomy replaced by other anatomy, give or take a little, and be unshaken by it. But a long, hot bath in absolute privacy was a step into the right direction. When most of the tingling pain was gone from her aching muscles and warped body, she experimentally tried to move her back legs, and found them quite easy to coordinate. She clicked her mandibles a couple of times, and those were totally under her control as well. She carefully examined her three-fingered hands, free of chitin but with sharp, hard and shiny black nails. They worked all right. Would be a bit awkward to use them thought, what with the sharp pointy bits curving over them.

So now she had a new body. A strange one. Very strange indeed, but still mostly Tabitha-shaped and, this was important, totally thinking and acting like her. She wasn't afraid of being stuck in it. She had a purpose. She would allow Doctor Sullivan and his staff to check what happened inside her. She would allow them to take blood, and samples, and she would do whatever tests they'd throw at her- she had agreed to do so. But all the time she would also be a new Tabitha, and would maybe find some adventures. Her inner child grinned at the possibility of things to discover. And Doctor Sullivan would tell her how useful she was. That made her even prouder, because it was honestly earned praise.

She climbed out of the bath and dried herself up, closely examining her body all the while. A human has a very clear idea about how his body is supposed to look and feel. Now everything was new. When she moved, she felt different: The weight of the back legs and their gentle swaying, the pressure of the mandibles against her cheeks, the shifting of chitin plates on and under her skin. A rhythmic movement in her chest, caused by four lungs that actively pumped all the time. She was pretty sure that she would get used to this new-ness though. And the looks… well, Tabitha had never thought too much of her body. She could get used to the dull dark skin, the chitin plates. They really had gotten almost everywhere, she realised, but had also left some pretty crucial places untouched. A good thing. Apparently even spiders needed to go to the bathroom. A thought struck her, and she felt her cheeks flush. Now very steady on her feet, she positively ran to the door and knocked. Pete Myers's voice, alarmed, from the other side: "Everything okay?" She smiled and shook her head.

"Super-duper", she called out, "But before we eat, I want some clothes. I think we need to cut some holes into them."


	8. Chapter 8: The Meat Pie Test

**The Meat Pie Test**

There was no chance of allowing Tabitha into the public cafeteria yet, so Pete went to get them all some food. He was glad to walk a bit, however much he had to strain his leg. Walking made it easier to stop thinking about anything too much. Since he hadn't been around the complex for almost two years, few people recognised him, and that meant he could walk in silence, at least until he entered the cafeteria. No way to avoid people in _here_. He grunted as he noticed two members of the pokemon history research team. Unfortunately, they saw him before he could take cover behind a handy pillar, and they still knew him.

"Myers! Hey!"

He gave a short wave, indicating that he was busy, and pulled a list from his back pocket. He made a show of reading it. He glanced at the counter, then started to fill three trays. The two researchers pushed through the line to meet him.

"Are you done already? How did it go?", one of them hissed. Pete remembered him, a John Smith, record holder for being the most unimaginative man with the most unimaginative name. Pete had never understood how someone so rational could find any interest in fantasy genetics.

"I am recording everything for you." Totally true.

"So you already started?"

"I wouldn't be here then." Yes, true.

"When will you start, then? Or, well, when will your applicant be ready?"

"No idea." Absolutely true. "Listen, you will meet Dr. Sullivan tomorrow anyway, he's the man who runs the show, okay? I'm just getting us a little snack. We will tell you everything in the end."

The other researcher- Thomas Bradley, argh, he'd never liked the man- snorted and helped himself to a buttered scone. Pete tried to get away from them as politely as possible.

"Sullivan's going to be in trouble soon", Bradley said and bit his scone, "Bet you'll regret jumping back into his lap so eagerly, Myers."

Pete carefully covered the trays with their isolated lids and snapped them on. He made a point of doing this slowly and deliberately, as if keeping the food warm was his only care in the world. "I did not jump into any lap, Tom. Funny image, though", he then said.

Bradley had the right face to look a downright bastard- long, sharp, angular, pale. Bug eyes and a piercing stare. Good thinker, though. He had translated a large part of the mysterious "old records", getting an alphabet together in hardly any time. He went by the moniker of The Librarian (with both the capital T and L) for a reason. Pete still didn't like him very much and saw little sense in hiding this.

"I have prepared a few documents", said Bradley, still chewing, "Should be interesting for old Sullivan to have a look at them. Translations. Pretty new stuff."

"New stuff?"

"Yeah, weren't you told? Oh, excuse me. You were away."

"What new stuff?"

"Field research found some new records the last month. Not much. A few paragraphs worth, maybe."

"Some new species mentioned?", Pete asked, keeping his voice low. Damned, now he had sounded interested! Bradley gave him a smug grin.

"We will tell you everything in the end", he said with great satisfaction, "Only that maybe, we won't."

Pete stomped back into the laboratory and dropped his trays heavily on the large desk at which Dr. Sullivan and Tabitha had taken seat. Sullivan had loosened his tie to indicate that a working day was over; Tabitha had donned a heavy bathrobe. Pete took this in, nodded and struggled out of his lab coat. Then he joined them and looked at his senior irritably. "I just remembered why I left Silph in the first place", he said, pushing the trays towards them, "The food's too pricey and the staff's plain nuts. Where's Lady Snow Cone?"

"She shouted a bit and then mentioned her father being a high-ranking general in some remote nuclear base, always ready to stand in for her, if I remember correctly", Sullivan said absentmindedly, "By no doubt he will shortly bombard us with nuclear warheads."

"She went for some alone-time", Tabitha chuckled, and eagerly made a grab for her tray. Before she could fumble it open, Dr. Sullivan calmly put his hand on the lid.

Tabitha instantly spread her mandibles, lowered her head and presented her horn.

"Leggo! That's mine!", she hissed, then stopped dead. Sullivan and Pete exchanged a glance. The doctor very pointedly kept his hand on the lid. The girl felt her cheeks grow hot. _She had offended her supervisor!_

"Ah", Sullivan said, "A defensive gesture to protect your means of sustenance. Completely understandable. This is _your_ food, Miss Carlyle. I will not take it away from you. There is enough food for everyone. But I want you to listen to me first. I will ask you a favour now. You are free to refuse it. In that case, I will _not_ let you have your food. I will repeat to ask you that favour. Forever. Once you do promise, though, I will take my hand away from the lid, and you can have the food. There may even be cake. Will you please stop snapping your mandibles at me?"

She stared at him, cheeks glowing. Her eyes darted back to the tray, then up again. She slowly leaned back and thrust her hands into her lap.

"Yes. Sorry", she said in a small voice.

Pete, who knew when his senior was trying out his little theories, got up and limped away to make some more tea. The engineer nodded, all the while keeping his hand on the lid. He noticed Tabitha's eyes settling on the tray again.

"No, look at me, please, Miss Carlyle. I am very sorry about this, but the happy funny joyride hour is over. The experiment has begun, the tests have started. There is research to be done. No, really! Up here, Miss Carlyle, look at me! I am your friend, I really am, but I am also your supervisor and the leader of a research project that, well, is basically you."

"Yes…" It was merely a sigh. She stared at him as if hypnotised. Under her bathrobe, he could see the additional legs spread. The girl was clearly on the edge, and he decided to push a little.

"I am now going to ask you that favour, if you're ready?"

"…right."

"Very good. Now, I want you, Miss Carlyle, to hit me very hard in the face."

She blinked, but Sullivan kept his calm, serious stare. Pete nodded, and almost grinned. He knew where this was going.

"Why should I want to hit you?" Tabitha's voice snapped back to a much more normal tone. She shook her head. "I won't. That'd be totally stupid."

"Miss Carlyle, in that case you will _not get your food_." He tugged at the tray, pulling it away from her. He saw her head dart forward, mandibles spread. Then she sunk back again.

"I am not hungry then. I don't want that stupid food anyway."

Sullivan sighed and turned his head to Pete, who was still pretending to be busy with the tea, smiling to himself.

"Pete, what did you bring for Miss Carlyle?"

"Ah, a meat pie, Doc. And a muffin."

"Gravy on the pie?"

"With extra crunchy bits. My mom made it that way." Pete smacked his lips.

"And which kind of muffin, Pete?"

"The chocolate kind with the runny jelly inside."

The doctor turned back to the girl. She was all but drooling.

"Your favourite dish, Miss Carlyle, as you stated in your application tests. Wouldn't it be nice to have that?" He leaned forward. "I ask you again to hit me in the face, Miss Carlyle. One blow, that's all I'm asking for." He slammed his hand on the table, and this time he yelled: "I am being very mean to you! I am threatening your food, damnit! I am going to take it away from you and then you won't have any!"

He tugged at the tray again, and this time he really took it away. There was an angry, rustling sound from the girl. The mandibles stretched away from her cheeks again. But out of that angry face two perfectly human eyes looked at him, mystified, and eventually they softened.

"I bet there isn't really a muffin", she said, "You can ask that stupid favour forever, I am not going to hit you. You are just making a stupid joke. So ha-ha, well done."

Sullivan smiled and finally- finally!- took his hands away. Pete almost clapped. _Good one, Doc, really good. Though I bet you were not sure…_

"By all means eat, Miss Carlyle", the doctor said, "Sorry, that was cruel and tasteless, but did you notice how you kept yourself under rather good control?"

She glared at him, slightly confused. Pete came over.

"Spiders are hunters, Tabby. Predators. And insects really defend their food. Not to the death, that would be stupid, but I've seen wolf spiders wrestle quite a lot over a dead mouse. When it comes to food, few animals play silly buggers, so as a test it was quite good. If you can stay on top of that, lady, I bet we can declare you a zero-threat in no time!"

Understanding finally dawned.

"I'm still me, you know, I could just have told you", she mumbled, but her heart wasn't in it. She reached out and dug deeply into the pie, fumbling with the fork. Damn, she'd needed that. And it was good pie, yes indeed-y. Good gravy, too. "I never want you to play those silly games again, Doctor! Never, ever! It's unfair!" She positively sprayed the sentence at him.

"Promise."

"No fingers crossed?"

"I have all my fingers in front of you."

"Then shake!", demanded Tabitha, feeling a tingle as the man gently shook her three-fingered, chitin-laden hand. She felt very good all of a sudden. She felt she'd done right.

It was a freaky little scene. But the three of them would come to remember it as one of the nicest moments ever, eventually.


	9. Chapter 9: Night Time

**Night Time**

Andrew Sullivan was among the first to enter the Silph complex in the morning, and very often he was the last to leave. But leaving he did, always, without fail. He lived in a small house not too far from his working place and regularly used the short walk to leave his work behind. The amount of work he had to leave behind dictated, very strictly, how fast he walked. When he arrived at home, his wife, without fail, would have some tea already poured, and they would share a warm hour in which his working for Silph would not be mentioned. He would instead ask her about her day, about her work, and about a dozen little everyday things. That was a pact they kept in honour. They were no longer very young, but they had a lot of things to talk about that did not include bad teeth or sore feet. Andrew Sullivan cherished each day that ended in the privacy of their home.

Even today he eventually made his way home, leaving Tabitha in Mrs. Joy's reluctant trust. Pete would surely keep an eye on her too. And no matter how enthusiastic and lively the girl had been, she'd sleep like dead, he was sure about that. He doubted that he'd be able to do the same. It had been a strange day, and there was a lot on his mind that needed thinking about. But not yet, not today…

Tomorrow.

He checked out and went home, walking slowly. There was a _lot_ of work to leave behind today, but he managed to take it all and stash it away in the neatly sorted attic of his mind. Tomorrow, there would be all sorts of trouble and excitement. Tomorrow there would be bills to be paid, questions to be answered, and a lot of people would expect him to know exactly what to do, which he didn't. There would be trouble…

Tomorrow.

"You're looking terrible, dear", said his wife as soon as he had entered and kissed her, "Did you have a bad day…" He merely raised a finger and reminded her of the pact.

They sat down. Emma poured the tea. He'd brought some leftover cakes from the cafeteria. They chatted about this and that. Emma had spend the afternoon assembling an image of one of the unnamed pokemon that were hidden in the bowels of Silph. She knew of them, but, since they had a pact, she had no idea that her husband was playing god in his working hours. She thought he merely analysed. But she enjoyed making these photomontages. Since this was her work, he accepted that her showing them off wasn't breaking the pact. And they really were very good images, so very lifelike. They made her proud, and he liked that look in her eyes.

They spoke about their son for a while, who'd finally agreed to come over for Christmas. All the while Andrew thought so very clearly not about what he had done today that he feared his wife to be able to read his thoughts. But if she noticed his absentmindedness she didn't say anything, and eventually they went upstairs.

He had to carry her, because she had no legs- lost in a car crash twelve years ago. She refused to use a modern wheelchair to scale the short flight of steps, and a lift was equally scoffed at. That would be something, relying on some stupid machine! So he just scooped her up, and carried her to bed.

Today he felt that a bit stronger than most days. She noticed that and remarked on it. He nodded and smiled, and that made her realise how long it had been that she'd seen him genuinely happy.

And that was the beautiful thing about tomorrows, they were _not today_. You always got a night's sleep before you had to face them.

In the darkness of a cloudy and foggy autumn night, Silph Corporation wasn't exactly a building. It was a flood of lights, all of them outlining the huge complex that housed three dozen different research facilities. People liked to call the sprawling complex an anthill, not knowing how much offence the common ant could take at that comparison. In an anthill, there was strict order and one main purpose, and each ant, by means of communication and signals, had a very good idea what all the other ants were up to. In an anthill, there was precision. In an anthill, each ant thought very small.

Silph never thought small. Whenever some major trend emerged, Silph wanted to be part of it. If Silph wasn't part of it that usually was because it had been setting the trend and was now without competition. Somewhere within the huge building, there was a specialist for anything, be it comparative physics, furry toys that dissolved after a month, enhanced vegetables, advertisement research, or genetics. And this had, over the years, created a structure where it was completely possible for an intelligent man to get a job, a moderate budget, maybe a small team, and then be forgotten about while he was happily inventing a better kind of screwdriver. There were several in-house legends how Silph had two employees firing lawsuits at each other for years until they realised that they were both working on the same project, in the same room.

Even on a good day, Silph Corporation as a whole wasn't even close to an anthill. It was a circus where all the clowns were on fire.

Thomas Bradley tried his best to keep the "Pokemon Research Team" small, organised and working at one goal at a time. That seemed easy enough- there were a mere dozen researchers, and there was not very much at all that could be researched. There was a vast potential for theories, yes, but Bradley had soon realised that there was hardly any way to get any practical use out of the extinct creatures. Once there had been strange beasts that closely resembled modern flora and fauna. Very nice, yawn, boooring. You could get very exited about it and try to make connections, form new theories of evolution and wonder for ages what colour they'd been. That was all. There was nothing really profitable man could learn from pokemon. They did not equal money.

Bradley knew this because he was, essentially, the base of every research plan. He was the one who'd created a complete alphabet from the records Silph had accumulated. It was a complex alphabet, resembling Mandarin in its tendency to have one little pictogram with a multitude of possible meanings. Bradley had worked hard on that alphabet; it really was a work of art. To be honest, he hadn't been too keen on the job as a translator, but eventually he had realised that it was a position of power. He had been given his own rooms, he had been shown all the records, and then, people had forgotten about him for a while. Bradley had cursed and read and guessed and poked and cursed some more, had finally made some small, fractured translations… and had been hooked.

When Sullivan and Myers had entered the team, things had been very stable. Bradley translated and selected and distributed his finds among the team. The researchers, glad to be given new purpose, went ballistic and heaped wild idea on wild idea. Bradley happily shared whatever little bit of data he could find about pokemon- descriptions, breeding tables, anecdotes, myths. That was harmless knowledge. And the language was so lengthy, flowery and soppy that he sometimes didn't translate too carefully. What did it matter if Rapidash had one horn or two, what did he care if Weedle seemed capable of destroying a whole tree in one night on his quest for amber? He tossed that information like cheap candy at a parade.

But occasionally he found a true gem, and those he kept for himself. There were three types of pokemon the rest of the team did not know about. There were also descriptions of some quite advanced machinery. Apparently the people of pokemon ages had not been stupid. They did some very clever math. Bradley saw much more sense in rebuilding an interesting, dead machine than in crying over the loss of some freak monsters. Machines equalled profit, if you could build them cheap and get good use out of them. But the people of the past, with their myths and their belief in pokemon legends, always mixed things up. Getting the hard facts out of these purple prose language they used was hard and took time. Bradley had to keep the research team busy, support them with facts, and he had his own research to do. He needed distractions. Sullivan had been a gift from above at first.

Sullivan agreed with the rest of the team that the pokemon creatures were the interesting thing, not some old dead records. But instead of looking at the records and taking wild guesses at how they once had lived, he wanted to tinker with their genetics. When he asked for additional funds to somehow acquire a fully functional DNA sequence of a pokemon in order to study their recorded toughness, Silph was thrilled. A great idea! Expensive, yes, but also very modern, very humanistic, very purposeful. And Bradley, all of a sudden, had a lot of time to pursue his own studies. Those had been good times.

But Sullivan had actually achieved small milestones. He had results and was eventually allowed to work on his own, with every support from the team. He had, with a stupid idea that couldn't possibly work, become the silent leader of the research team, a position that Bradley had held before- and that he had been very, very attached to.

Unlike most other employees of Silph, Thomas Bradley never left his work behind. He had his private rooms within the complex, next to his working study. There was one door that divided his working from his living place, and these days he didn't even bother with that one door. Late this night, unaware that three storeys below a genetically recreated female Ariados was fast asleep, he poured over a large scroll. It was not written on paper but on skin, pokemon skin. Very durable; the ink was apparently made from oil and lead. It contained one of the many legends he had stored in his vast library. Bradley knew it by heart, but he liked reading it over and over again. It was the first scroll he'd been able to read without a translation program.

It dealt with myths, as half of his sources did, but if you looked careful at all the things that just could not be, you could also see what people had tried to explain. Humans were like that. They didn't understand the seasons as the result of planetary rotation, so they invented gods who just made them happen. And once you had gods you wanted to tell stories about them, and all of a sudden you had the Greek myths or similar petty tales. The pokemon people had a great many myths, and in all of them, certain pokemon creatures were described as much wiser as your common homo sapiens, and thrice as resourceful.

Soppy. But you could see the facts behind the lie, you could explain the myth away and find the tiny grain of truth that would teach you something. This was what he really thought was his job: Take all the soppy, flowery fluff away from hard facts. Hard facts were reliable, and could be used. He was happy to share the fluff with his colleagues, though, since that kept them occupied. He called them candy-floss facts: No nutrition, but very attractive.

With a grim smile, he read about some facets of pokemon lore no-one but him knew about, and wondered how he could use them to his advantage. He realised that it was getting late, but he did well with little sleep. He couldn't wait to meet Sullivan the next morning and have a look at his little experiment. Bound to be a total failure, of course, and that, well, could only be interesting.


	10. Chapter 10: Rule Of Cool

**Rule Of Cool**

Tabitha had been given a small room all for herself. It was supposed to be her private place for the next months- though in truth it was crammed up with so much surveillance that any actual privacy could only happen during a blackout. There were no windows, and the only door led to the laboratory where she'd been spliced- this was not a happy home. But there had been a bed, and after a day that had seen her change on genetic level a _bed_ was all she'd wanted.

Now it was tomorrow, and she woke up, groaning and mumbling. She was not an early mornings person. A voice crackled from a nearby speaker.

"Miss Carlyle? Wake up, get yourself dressed, and wash. Dr. Sullivan will be with you shortly." It was the nurse, and she sounded as distanced and polite as an iceberg. Very much like an iceberg. As long as they were in the distance, they were okay. Tabitha blew at her hair and struggled to untangle her several limbs from the sheets.

"Wuzzee time?"

"It is five in the morning. Do get up now."

She groaned, heartfelt. Apparently there were some downsides to being a test subject. Her mind went through the unconscious check each human does when waking up: Everything okay, no pain anywhere, no things broken? She felt okay, apart from the fact that is was five in the morning and she wanted a coffee.

"'s too early", she fumbled out, and again the speaker crackled. The nurse spoke with cool politeness once more, but the iceberg clearly advanced and wouldn't stay polite much longer.

"You agreed on being the subject of this test. Get ready. I will leave my shift now, Miss Carlyle, but one of the doctors will be with you shortly. There will be breakfast, too. Have a good day."

"W… yes. Thank you, Mrs. Joy. You too, I guess."

She got up, padded over to the bathroom and went through her usual morning routine. She washed and brushed her teeth. She did the best she could with her hair, disorganised as it was. She changed into yesterdays clothes, a wide turtleneck and baggy trousers. It felt strange to have her back legs pressed down by the pullover, and the fresh yet somewhat porous chitin that covered so much of her body definitely rasped at the fabric. She wondered how long the clothes would last. Shoes were totally out of question. She felt uncomfortable and made a mental note that someone would need to get her some stuff she could wear without wearing it to shreds. And there had to be some scissors somewhere, she could hardly see for all the hair.

Tabitha still felt ill at ease when Pete Myers appeared half an hour later and let her into the laboratory or, as he grinned, her "fun new home". It did not look fun. But Pete had brought breakfast from the cafeteria and he looked totally relaxed. Tabitha found some comfort in that, so she let the remark pass by and joined him for scrambled egg and toast and coffee. This, she thought, was when and how a day should start.

When Andrew Sullivan had nothing else to do and people were unable to run away from him, he talked about whatever was on his mind. Pete Myers, on the other hands, made actual conversation. He chatted about a good night's sleep, movies, books, music and travels and other everyday things. He could talk without mentioning genetics, researches, science and tentacles at all. He was a people person- while his senior was very good at throwing entertaining facts at someone, Pete seemed to be aware that there was a life outside of Silph Corporation- even one that he seemed to miss.

He was a vagabond by heart. How he and his senior could get along so well was a mystery to Tabitha. They were so very, very different. Sullivan tried to learn from the smallest things he still could manipulate: Genes. Pete, who knew a good deal about genetics himself, didn't care about them at all. He was far more interested in the result of genes, in animals. As they chatted, Tabitha realised that Pete Myers, shabby jeans and stubble and limp, would really love to find a living pokemon once. And so he joined every field research, followed every tiny trail. You couldn't find pokemon in the tall grass, you needed to check rumours, old legends, you needed to trust people a normal, well-paid and studied man would hardly consider worth listening to. Pete Myers was an underdog even in the ragtag team of pokemon researchers, but he had single-handedly discovered, unearthed and retrieved the almost fossil Ariados that was now part of Tabitha's genetic make-up. He had also found a Tentacool once, and a strange skeleton of some ostrich-like bird with three heads.

But in the end he was part of the research project, and that lead to some technical stuff very soon. From an idle discussion about a rerun that both of them had seen in the theatres, he switched to something that concerned him. Unlike Sullivan, Pete always took care to show what he was talking about. He now showed Tabitha a lot of radiographs and printouts with many wobbly lines. He had printed out most of the data he had recorded during her Mix. Aware that the fun part was over, the girl swallowed her last bit of toast and bend over the scans. Pete fanned them out and scowled at them.

"You know what the Rule of Cool is, Tabby?" Also unlike Sullivan, he used proper street slang. Then again, he was not that much older than her. Four or five years were nothing when the elder still had something like a normal life. She nodded.

"That's what they do in all the movies", she grinned, "As long as it looks good, it doesn't need to make much sense. It doesn't need to work in real life. Like spaceships exploding when there can't really be a flame, or giant robots folding into small cars."

"Yup. And when I look at these images here, and at you, I see Rule of Cool." He sniffed. Tabitha thought that he tried to work up to some little joke and decided to join in.

"I'm very cool. My sister always said so."

"No, what I… Oh, you got a sister?"

"Yes, and a big brother too. I'm a middle child."

"Right… Now, listen. You make no sense. I mean, what the Mix did makes no sense. I thought a lot about it yesterday, and I think I have an idea why you changed the way you did. Rule of Cool is part of that."

"You are going to explain it now", moaned Tabitha, "And I am not going to understand it! Why is everyone here always doing complicated monologues? We had such a nice chat just a minute ago! I had you _this_ close to accepting that Han shot first!"

"Come on. Please."

"Talk to Doctor Sullivan, he is a _doctor_. I'm here for being me…"

"Do you know how different a spider is from a human?", Pete fired away. She gave in and shrugged.

"Yes, well, spiders are… spiders. Insects. And humans are mammals. That's easy."

"And it will not get any harder, okay? Now listen, this is interesting: A spider in a human body does not work. And the other way around? Also no way to work. We have a skeleton, spiders don't, they have their skeleton on the outside. We have muscles, spiders use actual hydraulics. We can eat pretty much everything, spiders can't digest solids. Mixing a spider and a human means to create a creature doomed to die."

"But I live, and I feel okay. And I eat normal food." She blushed. "And I can't climb up walls."

"You tried that, eh?"

"I would have liked that a lot. But I can't. My fingers don't hold, I slip." She glanced at her three-fingered hands with slight disappointment.

"But the fact is that you still work _as a human_. You have been changed to look very much like the original Ariados. All there, pincers, the back legs, lots of exoskeleton, even the horn. But that's all, you can't use any of it. No instant super powers like good old Spider-Man. No web-shooting, no wall-crawling. You look very strange, but that's it. Rule of Cool. Neat looks, but it really doesn't do anything."

"You must be very popular with the ladies", she said slowly, "I bet they fall all over themselves to get charming comments like that. Oh, nice make-up. Doesn't do anything, you know, but hey, it looks cool." She blew at her fringe and felt just a bit smug for the comment, which she had not meant to be all that serious.

"I'm not insulting you, I want to… Okay, look. I have checked all the data. The Mix is an awesome invention, it really is. But I think the true miracle element is the pokemon DNA itself. We have mixed it with rats. With simians. With living tissue and with spores. We have never before put it into a fully grown human. It's like…" He clicked his fingers. "I am mostly studying how nature works, you know? And nature's full of things that theoretically can't happen. Do you know that a bumble-bee can't fly? You can do all the calculations, and the result is, they are too heavy and can't eat enough to stay airborne for more than three seconds. Still they fly. Pokemon genes and the genes of a full-grown, living, complete human body can splice in a different way than pokemon genes and monkeys. It's like… like a shape that can work with whatever it is given, as long as it is human. I think that pokemon DNA has learned a clever little trick- it can stay alive even without being able to be in its natural form. And in addition to that, the Ariados was a pokemon. It wasn't a spider. That's important too. It is a lot like a spider, but it isn't one. It's an Ariados, see."

Tabitha nodded. She somehow understood what he was saying, but it seemed a bit like magic to her, and not really important- her purpose was to be Ariados enough to get some results for whatever cure they could squeeze out of her. That was what she was _for_. She was a bit surprised that such a simple and slightly stupid thought was so very comforting to her. She had a purpose. One simple purpose.

The laboratory's door clapped, and Andrew Sullivan stomped in, out of breath and clearly annoyed. He waved a short greeting and slammed his suitcase on the table.

"Great news", he snorted, "Full meeting in half an hour. The whole team. Couldn't talk my way out of it. We'll meet here, obviously. Miss Carlyle, please go and get that egg yolk off your face." He tossed her a plastic bag that contained a few carefully labelled cups. "And while you're at it, I want spit, urine, faeces, and bogeys. Big bogeys, please. Dig deep and greedy. Try not to hurt yourself with those spike things. Pete, tea, please, and I need to borrow your tie, it's nicer than mine. Miss Carlyle, _bathroom_."

He opened his suitcase and flipped through a mess of documents.

"I smell trouble", he grumbled, "We may live, but that's about it."

"Doc, we need to play toss after the meeting", Pete said. Tabitha, already on her way to the bathroom, wondered what that meant. The Doctor obviously knew.

"That's right", he said, "And I brought the funny one with the clown face."

"The Idiot Ball?" Pete pursed his lips. "Man, it has been a while."


	11. Chapter 11: A Flurry Of Questions

**A Flurry Of Questions**

Andrew Sullivan was used to talking to large audiences, and to be honest, he enjoyed it. But usually he talked about theory, and theory always had the advantage of allowing for some… creative ideas, convincing but not-quite-guaranteed guesswork, and (occasionally) downright lies. This time he had the theory (whose name was Tabitha) sitting next to him, making it praxis. There was little wriggling room when praxis was so clearly present and had a nosebleed.

Nineteen very clever men and women were sitting in two neat rows along the table. They knew as much about pokemon as Sullivan himself, though only a few of them knew very much about the Mix. Pete was in on that project, of course, and maybe two, three others. He would have to explain a lot of things. At least Bradley had excused himself. Sullivan couldn't say why he was so very pleased about that, but pleased he was. He smiled at Tabitha and gave her a good-humoured grin to indicate that he was in a much better mood now.

"This is it, Miss Carlyle, the moment where we'll write some history. Feel good about it, it's usually a once-in-a-lifetime experience."

"I'm very nervous, Doctor."

"Don't be. I'll do all the complicated talking, and I will occasionally ask you to eat one of them, that's all."

"I already had a good breakfast."

"That totally ruins my plans, you know? Are you sure there's no room for at least one of them? Look at Jonathan. He's very thin."

"Sorry, Doctor."

"I could hold his hands behind his back for you, you know?"

"Really, no, Doctor."

"Shame. Very well." He turned to his audience and smiled brightly. "I am very happy to have you all here", he lied, "And, well, you all know my assistant Pete Myers, who's just making some tea, and, yes, I think we should really start with the important news. As you know, I asked our employers to fund a project that was later codenamed "The Mix". The purpose was to allow pokemon genes to exist inside a human host. We did a lot of tests, the principle turned out very sound, resulting in just a few vestigial mutations and small, mostly pure strings of functional DNA. Well, you know most of that already. I think Gordon still has the rat with the leaves sprouting from its head. Right? Ah, nice. Now, yesterday, my assistant and myself injected my charming applicant here, Miss Tabitha Carlyle, who has a thing about tentacles, with a dose of Ariados genes. The "spider pokemon", as some of us know it. As you can see, the results were a bit unexpected and rather drastic, but we have already ascertained that she remained basically human, and very stable." He glanced at his fellow researchers. Some hands were already raised. He decided to make this as public a discussion as possible. It had worked for Aristotle.

"Jonathan, yes, what it is?", he asked.

"Chelicerae and a horn", said a man who spend most of his days pondering what kind of ecosystem the pokemon creatures could once have been part of, "What's so drastic about that?"

Sullivan realised that it was a large and solid table they were sitting at. And Tabitha was clad in a wide pullover and was deliberately keeping her head low. There was not very much to see of her. He shrugged. "Please stand up, Miss Carlyle. I would be grateful if you would remove that pullover, too. We're all respectable and wealthy scientists with standards, so there will be no catcalls."

Tabitha blushed, but did as asked. Free from the pullover that forced them down, her back legs instantly rose. The girl smiled nervously at the many people gawping at her.

"Hi", she quavered.

When the hubbub had died down, Sullivan nodded calmly and continued: "A _drastic_ change. What we have achieved is a bit more than a _mutation_, and Pete agrees with me that _splice_ is not quite the right word either. We have settled for _transformation _because it has the most syllables…" But there was no room for a patient monologue any more. The assembled researchers tried to get their questions out as fast and short as possible, mostly because they knew about the rule with the two scientists in one room being an argument. Sullivan watched the astonished faces with just a tiny pang of triumph. So he had made something impressive, no doubt about that. But that had not been the purpose of the Mix, and so he took his pride and stashed it somewhere deep inside. Later, yes, later he would cherish the image of two dozen people staring at him as if he'd shown them an actual alien. But now he had to stay on top of the conversation, and so he fired answers at the team as quickly as possible- precise and short and satisfying answers wherever possible, and he was honest enough to admit when he had no answers, too. This gave them all a lot of food for thought. This made it totally clear that from now on, the team would have access to a lot of new data. It guaranteed that from now on, there would be a lot of work to do- for all of them. Pete could only admire how his senior steered the talk- he himself had never been able to control his words in that way. Tabitha, once again fully dressed, sunk into her chair next to him, and lowered her head.

"He is good, isn't he?", she asked.

"He's super good. This will buy us some time for sure", Pete whispered back, "We need that. And in the end we will have the complete research team ready to declare you a non-threat. No-one can argue with us moving up then. Shit, this is going to be pretty exciting."

"I like seeing him talk that fast talk", Tabitha smiled happily, "That's what he likes best."

"Yes, I noticed your eyes glossing over there a bit."

"I think _that_ was because I can't understand half of what he's saying."

"Basically he says that this is going to be a team effort. And you can tell he's not too happy about that."

But happy or not, Sullivan was flying now. He gave some very precise orders, made polite requests, asked each and everyone at the table for their personal opinion. This wasn't two scientists in a room arguing about tornadoes, this was a group of slightly bored scientists being promised an interesting future. This was a meat pie for scientists: They could start to bicker, and would be allowed to continue their own studies, which were boring. Or they could team up, and then they would be part of that other future, which was interesting and well paid. In the end, four groups were set up, and a speaker for each group was elected. This was mainly to reduce stress on the test subject, Sullivan explained, and also to make sure there would be a clear structure in all tests and exercises. Each group would make their plans, discussing among themselves what would make sense, and then their spokesperson would only have to discuss the order of said tests with three other spokespersons. Pulling of beards would be avoided that way.

"And now", he closed, wiping his bushy brows, "I am sure you want to ask Miss Carlyle all sorts of things. I'll happily let you, but make sure not to mention tentacles at all. She seems to have an unhealthy obsession with them."

He nodded at his co-workers and patted Tabitha on the shoulder, communicating that he had every confidence in her talking with some of the most clever brains of the country. The girl was left blushing in two dozen curious stares, and Sullivan retreated to the background, where he helped himself to some tea. Pete sidled over to him. At the table, a wild flurry of questions arose, all of them aimed at a young woman who clearly hadn't prepared for being asked anything more complicated than her name.

"Good job", Pete said and made a grab for the biscuits, "Bit mean to push her into the spotlight there, though."

"She needs to get used to it. She'll be under constant surveillance from now on, and it's always good for a young lady to remember that being the centre of all attention is only fun for so long."

"Educational measures, from you? That's really cruel." Pete chuckled. Sullivan made no further comment, but he really wanted the girl to realise how large their team was, and how large a task the whole thing would be.

"I told her that I am not a nice person. Now, Pete, what do you think about Thomas not being here?"

"He said he was busy with a fragile document that wouldn't remain legible for very long."

"Yes, but he was so very keen on seeing our little experiment."

"He thinks we failed, and he knows he has a long time to come down here. It's just his style to come on his own terms."

Sullivan shrugged, indicating that he had nothing nice to say about Bradley and thus preferred to say nothing at all. But both of them knew that The Librarian would at some point be involved.

"Blast", he said. This was a very untypical thing for him to say. "You know, we really need to keep a lid on the whole thing. I got us all pretty busy. I'd love to keep things that way for a month or so. Do you know what the first thing Silph will ask us is definitely going to be?"

"I have a theory, yes."

"And so do I. We need backup from the whole team. We will need to prove that she's a non-threat, that she's stable, and that she's pokemon enough to give us really good results."

"I bet we can manage all that. And remember, we'll play toss." Pete bit his biscuit and couldn't help but feeling good. The future seemed bright enough to blind the average geek's spectacled eyes.

No-one had taken much notice of Mrs. Joy not attending the meeting. She'd signed off from her shift and had then gone to her personal quarters. Even here in the deepest basements, a restroom had been installed for the medical staff, and she'd gratefully sunk into a comfortable bed. But she couldn't sleep. She didn't like her new position. In Mrs. Joys precise blueprint of a life, she had always been the one who made the decisions. Now that power had been taken away from her.

And she still couldn't sleep. She made a few calls and whined and cursed at a few close friends, feeling no better afterwards and having lost quite a few close friends.

The anger bubbled in her stomach, and that was why she was still awake when Thomas Bradley entered the restroom, carrying a large suitcase. He gave her a polite nod and introduced himself. Then he started to ask questions, and since they were harmless enough questions that came from a man who obviously belonged to the research team, the nurse answered them freely- especially since this gave her an excuse to sob about the grisly Carlyle woman.

She felt better after letting of some steam, and Bradley seemed very pleased by her report. When he left, she finally felt calm and tired enough to get her well deserved rest.


	12. Chapter 12: Tossing The Ball

**Tossing The Ball**

It had been a long meeting. When Sullivan, Pete and Tabitha were finally alone in the laboratory, both men appeared tired, and Tabitha's head was spinning from all the complicated, high-speed chatter. She hadn't done too well in the flurry of questions, she feared, and naturally everyone had asked her about tentacles. Sullivan loosened his tie and fell heavily into a chair. Pete fiddled around with a complicated little gadget that went _blip _occasionally. Tabitha fumbled with a pencil for a while and then, carefully, started to doodle, just to get used to her fingers.

Eventually, Sullivan took a hacky-sack from his pocket and started to toss it into the air, catching it without looking at it. The Idiot Ball: It had, indeed, a happy clown face painted on, but was so battered and smudged that the once cheerful grin looked downright menacing. Pete put his equipment down and nodded. Then he caught the ball his senior tossed at him.

Playing toss was another little trick the men had come up with in order to avoid actual arguments when they were out of their specific depths. The rules were simple: One of them would toss the ball and catch it again, toss and catch and speak whatever was on his mind. He would not be thinking aloud about a problem, he would just… talk. Everybody talks, nothing wrong with that. Since the other man would be waiting to get the ball- without anything else to do, as you could say- he would, obviously, listen. Nothing wrong with that either. Then the speaker would toss it at the other man. That was why the game was called _toss_, after all. And he would catch and continue the talk, incidentally adding his own knowledge to the problem that was currently very clearly not discussed. While playing toss, there were no limits to the things that could be discussed because the discussion just didn't happen.

Playing toss had served them well and didn't let them down this time. Tabitha, who wasn't in on the rules, watched the ball describing precise arches in the air as Pete bounced it. Then, inevitably, talk happened. She tuned out almost immediately, there had been enough talk for one day, she decided. Silph Days, as she found herself calling them, needed more action.

"DNA is a blueprint", Pete began, casually, his eyes never leaving the ball, "It is a pretty nifty thing. The more complex the resulting organism, the less cluttered the DNA. A frog has several thousand different orders- the DNA needs to know how to make a frog happen in cold water, in warm water, in a rainforest, and so on. Mammals don't need that because they have a womb, and a mammal is basically always made in the same environment. That leaves a lot of extra room in their DNA. Extra room allows for changes to happen. Now if one were to say that pokemon, as a species, are a bit more complicated than we thought, one could say they are a complex species, like mammals. Then one could also say that large portions of their DNA could be considered free extra storage." Pretending that he had not just formulated a whole lot of scientific bullshit that actually steamed, he paused and tossed the ball to his senior, who caught and started to bounce it without missing a beat.

"We did very extensive comparisons and agreed that each type of pokemon we found closely resembles something we still know today", he said. Tabitha sighed comfortably. She could listen to that voice forever, it was so calm and soothing and honest. "Ariados is very much a primitive spider, for example. Same body structure, apart from the strange legs and the extremely human eyes. When something looks very much like something else, it must be at least slightly related to it." He closed his hand over the ball, but then continued: "At least, that is what we used to think." He tossed, Pete caught.

"But pokemon really are a complete mystery. The main reason for the Mix project is, after all, their enormous potential to deal, withstand, resist, and even absorb damage. It is very unusual for a species to share such a trait over all individual types. Pokemon operate on Rule of Cool, they are not as easy to understand as even Bradley likes to think. A very resourceful species will, eventually, come up with survival being part of their genetics. I think that pokemon can easily splice with a suitable host, and I think that humans make a good host. Maybe even a perfect one. How", and here he tossed, for the first time asking a direct question, "does the application test work?" Sullivan caught and sped up- feeling that they were going somewhere made him swallow a lot of pride.

"The test ensures compatibility to the Staryu pokemon, since it is the most simple donator we have fully analysed. Everyone who passes the test has a compatibility of at least eighty percent. Enough to work with, I always felt. It's mostly guesswork though. And in the end we only ever got one applicant, and one with almost a hundred percept compatibility at that. I admit that after I calculated that, I didn't even wait for more applications." Toss. Pete again.

"But I did the test yesterday", he said, and this time he hardly bothered to bounce the ball, "I did it with honest answers, and I came up with eighty percent. That means that I'm almost as good as Tabby as far as the Staryu is concerned. Then I started to put in random answers, and you know, I always ended up with at least sixty percent." Toss.

"Then…" Tabitha noticed excitement in Sullivan's voice now. He wrinkled his bushy brows and continued very slowly, "Then we did an Aristotle." He dropped the ball.

Thomas Bradley let himself into his own laboratory. These days every youngster with a flashy idea could have one, but Bradley's was a bit special.

First of all, it had once been a storage room, which meant it was a large, rectangular, well lit room with a lot of empty space no-one had used for a long time. Bradley wondered if anyone still knew about it- he had asked for it six years ago, and in all the years he had used it no-one had accidentally come to move in some crates of equipment.

Secondly, if there was one laboratory within the sprawling complex of Silph Corporation that could have "Don't enter, mad scientist inside!" written on the door, this room was it. All it lacked was a hamster in a treadmill and a few stitched-together corpses strapped to lightning bolts.

There were several machines here that Bradley had carefully reconstructed from data in his old records. Some of them seemed to work, but had nothing to be used on. Others clearly were inoperable, and he couldn't find out why. Some, however, worked perfectly and had all their parts carefully labelled. Of these few, one was currently switched on. It was a rather small machine, the size of a dishwasher maybe, and Bradley had build it himself. It had taken him four years- which was a lot of time for something that didn't do very much but building a small device. The problem was, of course, that it relied on a pokemon to work. It had cost Bradley a lot of time and even more money to acquire this last crucial building block- or building _orb_, actually: In a small cage that was mounted to the side of the machine, a ball rocked gently as it discharged energy into the machine.

It really was a ball. It was not very large, maybe the size of an orange. It was clearly made of some metal, and yet there was a slight pulsing to it as if it breathed. The top half was a dull, deep red, the bottom half an equally dull off-white, and just where the two colours met, two tiny eyes gleamed like polished pebbles. It was a living and breathing thing, made of metal and electricity. When Bradley had first seen it, a lot of the things he'd been reading suddenly seemed a lot less unlikely. That had been four months ago. The little creature had changed a lot. He had no idea what it was called- he knew pokemon were named after the sounds they made, but this one only hissed and growled. It seemed constantly angry, aggressive even- anger trapped in a body with no way to express itself. All it could do was lie there, wobble and breathe, and hum with electricity.

The little creature hissed and clanked as it bounced in its cage, and the machine hummed and rattled and, just as The Librarian reached it, finished the assembly of… well, a device. It dropped from a round slot at the bottom as if the complicated machinery was nothing but a cheap gum dispenser. Bradley picked it up and noticed that the strange little orb creature hissed fearfully as it saw the… device.

It always did. Strange.

Like many rather intelligent scientists Bradley was unable to come up with short and memorable names for things. He would have called duct-tape "useful stripes that hold things together". He considered fancy and catchy names a sin.

What he now held in his hands looked almost like an exact copy of the little pokemon that powered his machine, but it was clearly a dead device: A grey orb, all smooth metal, perfectly round except for one small button. This button, when pressed, caused the sphere to split into two exact halves, connected by a rather fragile hinge. The inside was as shiny as mother-of-pearl, broken by dark lines that refracted the light like obsidian. Bradley now owned three dozen of these orbs, though he had broken some of them down into their component parts in a desperate attempt to understand how they worked. Or how they would have worked, since there was nothing to test them on. His ancient records were very definite about these orbs, but what the records said had to be nonsense. He was very sure about that, and had no way to test them anyway.

He turned the orb around in his hands, once again noticing that you would only need to paint it red-and-white to make it look like the living metal pokemon. He clicked it open and ran his finger along the fine lines of black that broke the shiny inner surface. Snapped it shut again. Drummed his fingers on the assembly machine that now emitted a low, rumbling sound. It would remain inactive for three hours now, he knew, and then it would start again, creating a new orb. The reasons for this phase of inactivity, if there were any reasons, were unknown to him.

Bradley carefully placed the orb on a working desk, putting a sticky note on it which he labelled "34, took 5 days, good made". Some had been scratched, or had considerably less black lines inside, or lacked the button. A couple had instantly broken their hinges when he'd snapped them open. Some had been far too small. Apparently the assembling machine was not perfectly fit together. Or maybe the pokemon was not strong enough to provide all it was supposed to provide- whatever that was, Bradley still couldn't figure out exactly what it did. He could not talk to it, he could not feed it, he had no way of telling how healthy or old it was. Maybe it was the best to keep things running as long as possible and accept failures, as long as he was left with a few well-crafted orbs.

The Librarian walked over to the far end of the laboratory and looked glumly at boxes and boxes filled with… well, more orbs. The people of pokemon times had clearly been obsessed with orbs. He had several hundreds of the things. Most of them looked like the ones he could get from his machine- but scratched, battered, rusty, mud-encrusted and cracked due to their age. Some where metal, a few still showing the distinct red-and-white pattern. Some were very primitive indeed, apparently made from wood or nutshells, almost completely crumbled. If he understood his records correctly they were some sort of burial object. They mostly turned up in otherwise quite normal ruins, close to human skeletons. And one thing was odd, there were never more than six in one place.

Bradley grunted, willing them to reveal their secrets. He knew he was up to something. He knew it. And he had made progress for years now by thinking small, methodical and never jumping to conclusions.

He began to wonder if it was time for a change of plans.


	13. Chapter 13: A Little More Action

**A Little More Action**

The hacky-sack still lay on the floor, smiling its battered clown smile. It wasn't needed any more, Sullivan and Pete had played toss for the last time in their careers as pokemon researchers, but a bit later that evening Tabitha would pick up and pocket the ball, not knowing that she would keep it a treasure forever.

They sat around a desk- Pete had summoned a reluctant Mrs. Joy with all her basic equipment, and Andrew Sullivan had, with great care, set up a small fusion battery- basically a couple of test tubes with cloned, cleaned human tissue in a solution that accelerated the already quite radical Mix he had invented. The tissue, he explained, was "empty" and had no DNA of its own- it was a living sponge that could hold a bit of human blood, borrowing its DNA. Then the Mix would be applied, and funny things would happen. This was the most basic test he had been able to invent in order to show Mix results _quickly_.

"Because, well, people are always thinking in movie terms when they hear _gene splicing_ or _genetics_ or similar", he sneered, "They think you can just pump genes into anyone and instantly turn them into a T-Rex."

"It worked for me", Tabitha said in a small voice, "I changed very fast."

He nodded, seemed to think about this and that for a while, and then gave her a not exactly friendly smile.

"Because I made it so, Miss Carlyle. I told you I'm a clever man, didn't I? I usually do." The doctor sighed and checked his watch. He would have to walk home very slowly today, he thought, maybe he could check out a little earlier just to have the time to leave everything behind. Then he concentrated on the job at hand and made a nod to the nurse. "Samples from all of us, please, Mrs. Joy. Your blood too, if you don't mind."

Four small syringes were filled, four portions of tissue got their spare DNA. Four equally small doses of Mix were added.

"I had a bit of Sandshrew Mix left. The Sandshrew was very much like an armadillo, but with a tough, yellow skin. It must have looked like build from bricks. I never tested that Mix because we thought it was too complex- a mammal, and not even a small one. I may have been wrong with that… Hell, I'll be damned!"

Almost instantly, all four samples changed- the pale matter quivered, shrunk and took on a rich, sandy yellow. With a fizzing sound, the surface grew hard and porous, like rough bricks. One sample, however, kept fizzing and quivering… and crumbled after hardly a minute. A handful of sand remained. Tabitha was not entirely surprised to see that it had been her sample.

"Aristotle indeed", Pete sighed.

"Who's he?", asked Tabitha.

"Aristotle was a clever lad who wrote some of the first versions of what we call the laws of physics", Sullivan said, "He's ancient. But famous because he was so clever that he also became an example of a very special, clever foolishness."

"O-kay", Tabitha nodded, "And now for people who have half of a spider's brain."

"Aristotle once said that logically, a heavy object must fall faster than a light one. Because there's more weight. He was the first who said it officially, you know, and after that it was a fact. People relied on it. Aristotle was wrong, not too much later some clever Italian found out that all objects always fall with the exact same speed. Of course, he had better ways to check his facts."

"Okay, so the Aristotle guy made a mistake? And that's why he's famous?"

"Not because he _made_ a mistake. Because he never _checked_." Pete shrugged- he had always liked "the Aristotle guy" because he reminded him that the wisest men make the most foolish mistakes. And reportedly the man had made several mistakes- mistakes that were later corrected, but that also had been considered true facts for several decades. Even centuries. And now his senior had also made this very common error. Well, it was a trap that was almost impossible to avoid when you dealt with science. When you know what you want as a result, and you would have to check and double check and backtrack a lot of complicated stuff- you sometimes check your facts the wrong way around.

Pete noticed that Sullivan had visibly shrunk in his chair. All of a sudden, he looked really very old and tired. Tabitha saw it, too. She felt terribly guilty- something had gone wrong! She had done something wrong, there was no other explanation. She couldn't climb walls, that was it, sure!

She clicked her mandibles in irritation, startling the nurse to her left. Where did these silly thoughts keep coming from?

"The Mix is a failure, ladies and gentleman", the genetic engineer said in a terribly calm voice.

Tabitha kept her cool just to annoy Mrs. Joy, who was clearly bored and felt out of place. Mrs. Joy wanted to go. That made Tabitha wish, very firmly, to show she was more patient and supporting than the nurse. And she wanted Andrew Sullivan to stop being sad- but how could she? She herself was the proof that his invention did not work … but then her heart skipped a beat. Sullivan stood up and, to the surprise of Pete and Tabitha- though not to the surprise of nurse Joy, who had given up on being surprised ages ago- simply smiled. The girl felt a bit better instantly.

It was at this point the she reached down and pocketed the clown ball. It was also a point where history would have held its breath had it known how important the next few conclusions would turn out to be.

"But", Sullivan said, "We can also rephrase that a bit. The Mix as I _intended_ it to work is a failure. The result, however, isn't. I'm making a note here- the result is a huge success."

There are moments in a person's life when something is suddenly perfectly clear. Sullivan was very glad that this was such a moment, he really couldn't have coped with his most important invention being a brutally burst bubble. It made sense. He was about to say it, and it would make perfect sense…

"We can not use the Mix to recreate pokemon genes and keep them isolated in their host. That was what I wanted to do. That means the we can not be sure that the changed genetics in Miss Carlyle are even remotely pure. That means that our results will not necessarily be useful in recreating the self-healing powers that pokemon appear to own, and that means failure. Failure on exactly one level."

Tabitha sensed that this was important and tried to follow- if only she could concentrate. That voice was so calm and soothing that she could float on it forever.

"I hate making mistakes. I hate to admit that I have made mistakes. It hurts my pride. But at least it doesn't break any bones. And all my previous conclusions leave us with one interesting fact: Human and pokemon genes can co-exist very well. They simply overlay." He beamed at them. It was such a cool, screwed phrase.

"Dr. Sullivan, you are having a breakdown", Mrs. Joy said, "You do not make sense. I shall go and get you a…"

"No, no", Pete interrupted, "The Doc's right. Science basically is doing things wrong and learning from it."

"And being laughed at", Sullivan muttered, "That's extra."

That sounded promising, Tabitha thought, that sounded as if there still was a way to get something useful out of her Ariados body. She gave a sigh of relief.

"For some reason, pokemon and human genes splice perfectly. The Mix was supposed to allow isolation, and it did not work. But instead of a messy disaster we got the once-in-a-lifetime Mary Sue super jackpot. I am not sure why, but there seems to be enough shared information in both DNA strings to create a… well, I am going to call it an Overlay from now on. Write that down, Pete, it's nice and snappy, that's rare. Yes. You are not a unique healthy mutation, Miss Carlyle, you are what happens _whenever_ a human and an Ariados have their genes spliced. The odds to find a catalyst like the Mix by accident are really one in a million. But we did. No sense questioning it. Pokemon and humans must share quite a few evolutionary branches. I am very exited to find out more about that."

Tabitha was lost in his voice. She didn't even care what he was talking about. He was glad and proud, and she was part of that. That was enough. Pete interrupted the impromptu redefinition of time-honoured, proven facts.

"It makes sense, Doc, but that would also mean…"

"It means the Mix is a failure", Sullivan insisted, "Because we can't use it as a base cure. Even if an Ariados lived forever and could cure any disease in the world with its spittle, who would have himself transformed into one to be healed from cancer? That's one of these lines in the sand people don't cross." He paused, aware that he ignored the most basic law of human logic: However sick an idea is, someone _will_ do it. That's why he had taken so much care to keep Tabitha hidden since her transformation, and that was why he had rallied the whole research team. He needed backup.

"But maybe we don't need the Mix any more", he closed, "Maybe we can now learn if we, _homo sapiens_, already have some of these pokemon tricks hidden in some part of our own genes. That obviously changes the whole project, but it has a good ring to it, don't you think? Sounds very neat. Almost humanitarian."

"Don't you need permission from the big chairs for that?", Pete asked, but it was clear that he did it just for the look of the thing. As far as he was concerned, the leading officials of Silph Corporations had no voice in this.

"Eventually, yes. But Miss Carlyle seems dead bent on being our test subject anyway, and we already broke our contract without her objecting. Are you still with us, Miss Carlyle?"

"I really wanna hug you now", she blurted out, instantly slamming her hands over her mouth, "…ouch!" But he thought she was trying a joke, and was lost in a world of theories anyway, so only Pete noticed her strange behaviour.

"Then this is the plan. Right now we have guesswork, but I know it is _good_ guesswork. I know I'm _right_. The Mix is obsolete now, but we can't admit that officially, Silph would instantly shut the project down. Or, much worse, take an interest. Can't be having with that. But we have a really very promising potential Nobel price here. All we need to see is if Overlays would really always be stable, and what their genes can do, and if human genes can be reminded that they could do it too, once, and if so, we jog their memory a bit, and then we have what I'd like to call an outstanding success."

"Simplest way would be to inject someone else with the same Mix and see what happens", Pete said with enforced humour in his voice. His senior made an angry face.

"Stupid! No-one would be that stupid!"

"But it really doesn't feel that bad", Tabitha insisted, "It didn't hurt that much…"

"Yes, but you are _no longer a human being_, Miss Carlyle. That should concern you a little, by the way. No. I'd rather not have Silph snooping at the Mix. No, we keep quiet and do our work. Let's all go home now. It has been a long day, and tomorrow, I promise, we will hit you with large hammers and so forth. No more talk. Talking time is over."


	14. Chapter 14: Put To The Test

**Put To The Test**

"Wake up, Miss Carlyle."

"Huh? Wuzze time…"

Tabitha opened her eyes, fighting the confusion of a night's uneasy sleep, and then almost jumped in shock. The nurse Mrs. Joy stood next to her bed. She had woken her up. But at the end of the bad, a stranger was standing- a large, bald man with an almost rectangular face. His dark eyes watched her with mild curiosity. He held a large suitcase and a few folded-up clothes. She almost instantly disliked him, mostly because he looked like a man who was easy to dislike, but also because he was very clearly not supposed to be in a room where she was sleeping with very few clothes on. She dragged her sheets around her.

"There is no need to be afraid, Miss Carlyle", said the nurse, "This is Thomas Bradley, the head librarian of the research team. He is here to guide you through a few tests this morning."

"Huh? N… no, I thought Doctor Sullivan would…"

"The good doctor", Bradley interrupted her, "will join us later. He knows that I am here, of course. Get up now, please."

Reluctantly Tabitha did as ordered, feeling oddly vulnerable in the oversized shirt she'd been sleeping in. Bradley nodded. When he was surprised by her altered shape, he did not show it. His absolute calmness restored some of Tabitha's faith, they were all grown-ups, this was a research facility, nobody was going to rape her, obviously. She didn't exactly like the way he looked at her, though. His eyes were too cold, too dark, and she couldn't read his face.

"Change into this, please", he said, handing her a sports bra and Capri trousers. Again, Tabitha felt slightly uneasy about it, but took the stuff and went into the bathroom, which she locked. She wasn't especially given to guile but listened at the door for a while. Neither the nurse nor the man said anything. Tabitha shrugged, and after a cat lick she changed into the sports clothes. They did feel good, she had to admit. The bra allowed her back legs to move freely, and the trousers left her shins free. Better than the stuffy turtleneck and the cargo pants. She silently counted to ten, feeling stupid for doing so, then stepped back into her room.

"Can you even see with all that hair?", Bradley asked, not mocking, not teasing, not even interested, just using a few words and one question mark. Tabitha shrugged.

"It grew when I changed, Mr. Bradley. I had no time to do anything about it yet."

"We will spend a few hours in a gym, and you will need to move around a lot. Would you object to a haircut?"

"Object? Hell no, I'd love to get rid of those curtains!"

"Mrs. Joy, would you be so kind?"

The nurse, who had looked at Bradley with approval for the whole time, suddenly seemed no longer very fond of him. But she nodded and, after putting on gloves, did a rather solid job. Tabitha wondered if she had children, and had done improvised haircuts like this before, simply taking away from the sides and fringe until it looked sort of decent. She realised that she really didn't know a lot about any of the people she'd be stuck with for quite some time, and made a note to change that.

"Thank you", she said, making a start, "That feels much better."

"All set, then", Bradley said dryly. "Mrs. Joy, be so kind and come with us. Bring your equipment, just in case. Miss Carlyle, you know your way around here?"

"Not really, no. Where is this gym?"

"Just follow us. We will need to go three stories up and…"

"But Doctor Sullivan said I was to stay…"

"Doctor Sullivan knows about this", Bradley said, clearly annoyed to have to repeat himself, "And it is still very early, nobody will see us. The gym can be locked and sealed, Miss Carlyle. And I happen to be part of your supervision, and I think I gave you an order."

Tabitha bit her lower lip. Andrew Sullivan was her supervisor, and she trusted him. This man was a stranger, no matter how calm and professional he acted. Being in the same team didn't give him the same rights, she thought. Trust is earned, some inner voice told her, trust is always earned. And that man looked at her like she really was an icky spider. But she saw little sense in acting prissy now. If she had to jog or lift some weights or whatever, and Bradley was doing something wrong, Sullivan would scold _him_ and comfort _her_ and everything would be _well_, right?

"Well, okay", she mumbled, "Sorry, sir. I'm not good with early mornings."

"Ah, who knew."

Three stories above, the Main Gym was a bit of a conundrum. It belonged to the scientific research facilities and housed several training machines for physical exercise, a few of them quite flashy. It was located in the eastern wings of Silph, and it had a high, domed ceiling that was mostly glass panes. This early in the morning, the fog was thin enough to allow a pale sunrise doing its orange-tinted magic. Tabitha had, like so many people, frequented the odd fitness club and thought that Silph's version really had style. There was a lot of space. There was a free-climbing wall. There even was a small pool and a set of boxing rings. Coloured lines covered the ground, allowing for field sports. It really was one great playground, and everything was very clean and obviously rather new. Elderly doctors and researchers rarely feel the urge to go for a quick game of basketball. But one man was in the gym even this early, jogging over to Bradley and the women when they entered. Bradley produced a key and, with an exaggerated gesture towards Tabitha, locked the door. He then greeted the man, who wore the casual uniform of a Silph security guard but looked muscular and tanned enough to double as a personal fitness assistant. A sports bag hung from his shoulder, and he nodded at Tabitha with barely concealed nervousness.

"Gregory will aid me", Bradley explained and led them all to the centre of the large hall, "He is part of the Library's personal security staff, and he is totally trustworthy. Gregory, this is the Ariados mutation I told you about. What do you say?"

The man raised his eyebrows at Bradley. Then his eyes darted back to Tabitha. Intentional or not, her current outfit revealed all major parts of her changed anatomy, and she remembered how odd she must look. Strange- she herself had almost forgotten about her ash-grey skin, the chitin plating and the dozen tiny changes. She was barely aware of the pincer-mandibles, and even her fingers felt rather normal as long as she didn't actually try to grab something. Within hardly two days, she'd grown quite accustomed to her body.

"Good morning", she said weakly, "I'm Tabitha." The man stared a little longer, then he shook her hand and left it at that. Bradley dropped his suitcase and opened it to reveal an odd assortment of things. He hesitated, then he took a clipboard and a small metal orb. He flicked through some pages. Tabitha relaxed instantly. Talk. Talk was harmless.

"_The Gladiators would roam the land_", Bradley read from a page, "_They carried with them the special orbs and would openly confront the pokemon. The Gladiators, being honourable and pure, were careful to stand up only against the strongest pokemon: Pack leaders, swarm queens, mellowed plant-types. And even more, the Gladiators felt themselves bound by honour to offer a challenge but not to insist on it. They would not go after a wounded pokemon, they would not steal a mother from their litter, and they only proposed a challenge to pokemon that were able to defend themselves._"

Tabitha perked her ears as soon as gladiators were mentioned. She glanced uncomfortably at the security guard.

"_And pokemon rarely refused a challenge and were only too eager to prove their strength_", Bradley continued, "_There was something in even the smallest and weakest Caterpie that edged them to face a fair fight. And thus the Gladiators, relying on honour and strength, could fill their orbs. This was called the Capturing, and each Gladiator took great care that he treated their captured pokemon well, for though they were below Humans, they were still alive, and the Gladiators believed that all life should be treated with respect._"

The Librarian lowered his clipboard and stared at Tabitha. Once again she felt that he only saw the Ariados. "That", he said, "Is a rather flowery part of a large myth I was able to translate, called The Gladiator's Journey. It is full of strange little bits like the one I just read. I was always very sure that it really is nothing but a myth, you know? People just love to wrap things they can't explain by science into some miraculous tale. Noble warriors, pokemon acting almost sentient, having their own code of honour, even a language a patient gladiator might be able to learn. It sounds extremely fantastic. If you wish, I can give you a copy, Ariados are occasionally mentioned. To be honest, almost all pokemon names I use as a reference in my transcriptions are mentioned in this work. Maybe it is of interest to you, at least it should be… entertaining. And the Gladiator's Journey must have been a popular myth, because it spawned many copies in a relatively short time. All of it, regrettably, nothing but more and more diluted fiction. But that might just be your taste, am I right?"

"Yes, er, yes, thank you", Tabitha managed, "That… Yes, I'd love to read that. Is it long?"

Instead of an answer, the man handed her a spiral-bound pad from his suitcase. He did so with some ceremony, as if offering her a bit more than just a printout of some translation.

"It beats the story of Ulysses, for sure. But before I allow you back into your quarters, I'd like you to assist me. You see, I think that in all these myths and creative lies there could be a grain of truth. Maybe even a small pebble of truth. A brick, if I am lucky. I'd like to test something."

"Then why here in a…"

"Miss Carlyle, you are nervous. That is not helpful."

"Sorry. I just am."

"Don't be. Relax."

"It just… it sounds strange, I never knew about all this gladiator stuff. I don't know if I like that, to be honest."

"Irrelevant. Tests is what you are here for", Bradley said bluntly, "That is what you _are for_."

He was right, sure enough, but Tabitha had been pampered by Sullivan's constant friendliness. Sullivan wouldn't have said that, she realised. But well, it was true, wasn't it? She had one purpose.

"And Doctor Sullivan will be very proud of you, won't he?", Bradley said.

"Uh… O-kay. I… I don't really need to face a _gladiator_ or something, right?"

For the first time, Bradley gave her a genuine smile. It changed his face, not much but still to a point where one would have to admit that the man _could_ look quite friendly and even charming. He twisted the small metal orb in his left hand, and Tabitha felt her eyes being drawn to it. Her back legs twitches ever so slightly, and she felt her lungs stopping just for a second. She remembered… what? Nothing, because she had never seen such a ball. She shook her head, wasted a smile on Bradley and squared her shoulders.

"Tell me what to do", she said.

"Just step back a little. Yes, that should do. Now spread your… arms. Close your eyes, please, yes. Good. Now… this might sting a little."

-smack!


	15. Chapter 15: The Capturing Orb

**The Capturing Orb**

The metal orb hit Tabitha at the shoulder, and she opened her eyes as soon as she realised what Bradley had done. The small ball bounced and dropped to the ground, splitting into two exact halves connected by a hinge.

"Ouch! What was _that_ for?"

And then she realised that Bradley, the security guard and Mrs. Joy were quite a few steps away from her, and that the orb was humming. She felt an exquisite shiver of fear. It started at her temples and slithered down her spine like so many ice cubes. It was not something she could put a name to, not a fear _of anything_ at all, it was simply _fear_, pure and animal. She looked at the small metal thing at her feet. It was so small, so very silly, and yet looked so very menacing, and she couldn't get rid of the feeling that she knew something about it.

A flash of red light erupted from the orb's centre, almost blinding her. With a yelp she jumped back, trying to get away from the ball, but she was already enveloped in its light, was wrapped into warm, zigzagging flashes of red. She could not see, but her body felt as if it was melting away, and she felt a terrible, forceful pull that took her off the ground and then, quickly, _forward_. A snapping sound boomed somewhere at the threshold of her hearing, dull and muffled. Tabitha realised that she could not see herself any more. There was red light filling her vision, and that was it. She panicked. Without understanding very much at all she tried to see, to move, to flee. She didn't like this. She didn't understand this. She wanted Andrew Sullivan, together with his calm voice and his dry humour.

And then, with a strange little sound, she dropped to her knees and opened her eyes. She could see again. She was… free?

Orange light from large window panes shone down on the polished floor of the gym hall. In front of her was the orb, open, rocking slightly. She felt all her lungs pumping like mad. She remained in her crouching position, confused, trying to get her breath back. There was a door here. It was a locked door, but a door. An exit. Doors could be smashed. Doors lead somewhere else. Could she smash a door?

"_As a test of strength, the Gladiators would pit pokemon against pokemon, and it was accepted that each conflict should be solved like this. No Human should ever fight or threaten another Human. A conflict could be solved by a fight of two captured pokemon, because this would not only put their strength to the test, but also the character of the Gladiators, and their ability to lead and to form strategies. And in the hope to gain advantage, Gladiators made long journeys to find the strongest pokemon they dared to face. They fought them until they were exhausted, and once worn down, even a powerful pokemon would not be able to escape from the capturing orbs_." Bradley's voice was droning now. Tabitha felt fear and shame and rage. Capture? She had almost been captured? She had almost been captured by that man? What did that even mean? Her head snapped up.

"What did you do to me there? What is that thing?", she demanded.

"You are pokemon enough to respond to a capturing orb, Miss Carlyle."

"What does that _mean_? Sir, I wanna go. I don't…"

"The process of capturing is a central part of the myth, and apparently there is truth in it. This is very interesting! Now, I wonder if the next bit it also true? That a weakened pokemon is easier to capture?" The Librarian turned his head towards the man Gregory, who hesitated a second and then dropped his bag.

"I am leaving, sir", he said, "This is insane."

"You are willing to risk your job? I told you that this will not be the least harmful to the test Ariados. They heal amazingly well, I am given to understand. And they possess natural resistances to certain types of attacks, too."

"I am going to report this, and then I am leaving, sir. And the lady's coming with me."

Bradley shook his head in real disappointment. Then he pulled a gun from his jacket and very slowly cocked it.

It was a terrible cliché. But it was also a gun.

"No", he said, "I think you are going to aid scientific progress, Gregory. Come on. You and I know you could take me down, but can you be sure how accurate my aim is? Or that I won't shoot at someone else? You are paid extremely well for a simple hour of boxing. I think there are much harder jobs in life."

"You are all totally mad!", Tabitha cried out, "I wanna go!"

"You and me both, lass", murmured Gregory, picking up his bag again.

Andrew Sullivan had entered his office rather early this morning, and was very surprised to see that he wasn't the first one. Pete sat at his personal desk, clearly dejected.

"Tabby's not here", he said instead of the usual good morning, "And Mrs. Joy left a message on the text pager that she'll be quitting her job if we assign her to any more, wait for it, unnecessary tasks involving, I quote, that eerie woman with the legs."

"Let me see!" Sullivan quickly browsed through the pager's stored messages, and his initially good mood dissolved. "Ah. Well, that was Mrs. Joy, no doubt about that. But we don't even have any test assignments this early, and…"

"Well, it's a team effort now", Pete said, "And we are not the only ones who have a key to the laboratory. Maybe some other group thought a little private test would be okay."

"I don't like that. Miss Carlyle should be… wait, have you checked her room?"

"She's not in. I found some hair, that's all. No, just cut, I think she had it up to here with that curtain fringe. So, what do we do now? Wait until someone brings her back?"

"I really wonder why she just went…"

"Doc, her IQ drops to the floor as soon as someone so much as mentions you. Hello, Miss Carlyle, Dr. Sullivan sent me, we just need you for a minute, and she's all glossy eyes. Didn't you notice?"

"Now, Pete, she may be a bit naïve, yes, but she's mostly trying to be helpful. Matter of education, I think. She loves the idea of us doing useful research, that's all."

"Nope." Pete lowered his head. They had no ball this time. This was going to be awkward. This was the one moment he had avoided for all of his career at Sullivan's side.

"I think she has had her mind affected. Like, really affected. You can't mix two species without something getting tangled. There is such a thing as racial memory, and…"

"Pete. I know your theories", Sullivan said, with a hint of warning, "We talked about them a lot in the first few months here."

"Yes. And you said they were sound."

"Agreed. Words are always sound. Have you written them down and proved them in the meantime?"

Two scientists in a room. There was no escape now, and the tornado was building up.

"Doc, we both know you are a genius, but in a few very small parts of pokemon lore, I actually out-doctor you. We have valid data, pokemon did actively pass down knowledge. Hunting tactics, predator shapes, safe nesting places, all of that. If you put racial memory into a brain that already has racial memory of its own, what happens? What if the Ariados somehow, oh I don't know, respected a certain kind of behaviour? Tabby is almost running circles around you, she'd do anything to please you! That isn't her liking you, that's pet loyalty."

"Stop it here, Pete." Sullivan's voice was very calm, dead calm. The tornado swept, Pete just had carried that one with himself for too long, and realised that he had no brake to pull.

"Because I'm right, right?", he snapped. He knew that he was playing with a friendship here. But the words were out now. Sullivan did not say anything for quite some time. Then he sighed. He turned to one of the ever-active computer screens and tapped a few buttons. There was a tiny flash and a very small ping. The man visibly sagged.

"Yes", he simply said. The tornado collapsed. Pete could not believe his luck.

"Yes? Just yes? What did you do there?", he asked and limped over. Sullivan turned around ever so slightly, so that Pete could only guess that there was a tear in his senior's eye.

"Well, I just checked where she is. She's up in the Main Gym. And then I checked who'd be in there now, and there is a reservation. Bradley, Thomas, Librarian, The. You'd need to be some very stupid little lab rat to follow him of your own accord, don't you think?"

"Doc, when I said stupid, I…

"Pete, it's okay. I think it's time I swallow what pride I've got left, so… well, thank you. Thanks for speaking up."

The looked at each other. They had actually violated the law of two scientists in one room. From now on they wouldn't need the ball anymore.

"I still get more money than you, though", Sullivan said conversationally, "And I have much better toys than you. And I just out-smarted Bradley. Follow. I want to see what's going on."

Tabitha felt like crying, but she didn't. She doubted it would help very much. The security man Gregory had, with all the reluctance he dared to show, put on light boxing gloves. Bradley had ordered him to hit the Ariados- her!- but not to knock her out. Gregory had glared at him. He had then stepped into the boxing ring. Tabitha had been ordered to follow. She was now, very clearly, also in the boxing ring. With that many boxing-related things, punches seemed impossible to avoid. Gregory watched her with some pity.

"Ever boxed?", he asked quietly, "Don't know, ever had a punching bag or something?"

"No-"

"Then simply try to hit me. Hit me as hard as you can, yes? Because that's what I will do. I am sorry. I would simply hit you over the head, you know, so you're out of it, but who knows what he'll do then. Keep your arms in front of you. Is that… spider stuff there any use? Like, er, protective padding?"

_She's losing bones_, Pete had shouted, _spiders got an exoskeleton_. Tabitha winced.

"That's my bones", she whispered, "You are going to crack my bones…"

"No way", the man said, "Bradley, this is insane. Do you really think you'll get…"

"No, no, Gregory, please. We already have what is technically a hostage situation, we have a man with a gun, we have tense pressure. If you're to ask if I think I can get away with this, that would really be a bit too much. This is scientific progress being made, so would you kindly start punching?"

"Asshole", grunted Gregory. Tabitha was irrationally happy to hear the curse, it made it clear that he didn't want to do this.

Then the man took one step forward and, with a speed she had not expected, hit her in the face. He had carefully aimed for the chitin plating on her temples, maybe hoping that this would soften the blow, but it still was a punch delivered by a strong man. Tabitha stumbled and almost fell; her back legs saved her, dipping down, cushioning her fall and pushing her up again in one smooth movement. Blood trickled into her eyes, and she gave a scared yelp.

"That is enough", she heard Gregory shout, "She's bleeding already. Try your freaky little ball and stop this."

Tabitha steadied herself and fought back nausea and tears.

"Barely a scratch", Bradley answered coolly from below, "Proceed."

"I am going to kill him afterwards", Gregory hissed. Tabitha ran her elbow across her face and sniffed. The fist came again, and she didn't even try to evade it.


	16. Chapter 16: Schroedinger's Door

**Schroedinger's Door**

"You chipped her?", Pete asked as he clumsily hurried after his senior. The small moment of anger was over, already forgotten. Bradley and Tabitha in one room was bad news no matter who had followed whom. Bradley was bad news all of his own.

"No use having a test subject that can go rampage without me being able to track it, right?" Sullivan once again moved surprisingly fast for a man of his weight and age. Pete had trouble keeping up with him.

"Doc, what exactly are we doing here?"

"Valiantly dashing to the rescue", the man said firmly.

"Ah? That sounds a bit extreme, don't you think?"

"No, it doesn't." Sullivan stopped at the Gym's door, adjusted his tie and tried to get his breath back quickly, "We are still an official Silph project, Pete. There are some rules, and Thomas broke them."

"Right, okay. But…"

"No, no buts. He could have asked, and I would have refused, okay? That's how things go. Rule Number One, _nobody touches my stuff_. Let's get in there, and then I will use my elderly voice of sufficiently complex wisdom on him. You got a key?"

"No. I never go in there, I mean, fitness halls? That's for women…"

"Shame." Sullivan tilted his head and glared at the door, "Here we are, pinnacle of the evolution and all, outwitted by a door. Hurry. The janitor in B5-A has a master key. That's not far."

Pete shuffled away quickly. Sullivan shook his head and then, carefully, leaned against the door and listened. He thought he had just heard someone cry out.

Tabitha wasn't feeling well. She wanted this to stop. So did Gregory. But Thomas Bradley wouldn't let him, and was constantly changing the rules now. He demanded that the guard did not hit her in the face too often. He insisted on punches in the ribs, the shoulders, and also everywhere soft. Occasionally he reminded Tabitha that she was supposed to fight back. He actually _read her bits about Ariados fighting other damned pokemon. _But she couldn't listen, least of all comprehend. She tried to concentrate on Gregory instead, who circled her slowly, pretending to take aim. She knew that he was really just trying to give her a breath and a chance to land a punch of her own, but his well-meant intentions ultimately meant that she had to endure more punches. She tried to copy his movements, but there is a lot more to boxing than just hitting each other with full power, and Tabitha wasn't good at any of that. She had no chance, and she knew it. Eventually she would just faint, she knew, and Bradley would toss that metal ball at her again, and then what? What did this capturing thing mean? Had she been inside that ball? Well, had she? And if so, how did that even work?

"Miss Carlyle, concentrate", Bradley called up, "Gregory, stomach, please."

"Bastard…"

But he had to place the punch.

Andrew Sullivan took a moment to _asses the situation_, as he would later write down in his personal records. He was a plump man and not physically impressive, but his mind was a wonderful display of fireworks now. He thought, quickly, trying to make sense of the few things he knew. Sullivan tended to misjudge people generously, thinking of them as stupid rather than maleficent, bored rather than destructive. He liked to think that people did a lot of really silly things with innocent, good intention. And thus, he thought, all of this might be a large misunderstanding, a bit of paranoia leading to ridiculous conclusions.

Bradley was… different. Few people knew that Sullivan had tried to win the man for the Mix project- most of the pokemon researchers thought that the Mix was a solo effort. But the engineer had approached Bradley, had explained his plans, had set his rules, and for almost five months they had been working together. In this time, Sullivan had grown more and more uncomfortable with the Librarian's view on certain things. For Bradley, a fact was the ultimate goal. He would not let go of anything before he could either prove it absolutely true or absolutely false, and he never really cared about consequences. This was perfectly valid behaviour when you dealt with dead books and ancient fossils, where things rarely got physically hurt. It did not make very much sense in the Mix project, which was weird science of the old-fashioned "let's just put a lot of live matter into one bubbly cauldron and see what happens" kind.

Both men had agreed that a combined effort would never pan out. Bradley had agreed because he had seen that the Mix was a toy, not worth his time. Sullivan had agreed because he didn't like working with a man who lit lab rats on fire just to see what happened.

And now Bradley was in one room with the- Sullivan almost grinned- most advanced lab rat ever. There were all sorts of explanations for this. Maybe he just had been curious, maybe he had a very harmless little test prepared. These were perfectly reasonable and harmless explanations, and Sullivan wished he could even consider them realistic.

"Ouf…" Tabitha had her breath knocked out of her and slunk back, feeling another punch against her torso. She felt her back legs trying to stabilize her, but forced them down to her sides. She did not _want_ to stay upright. She felt the thud as she hit the ground, and closed her eyes. She would just stay down. Yes. Just down. This was… bliss.

There was a sigh from Bradley.

"I thought an Ariados would show a lot more stamina, you know", he said to the nurse who stood by his side. Her face was white. It was not a mask of terror, because Mrs. Joy did not like to display such a shallow cliché, but she _was_ afraid. She was also aware how ridiculous the situation was. One man, admittedly one with a gun, was trying to have his way with three other people. This should not be possible in real life. Surely three persons would always be able to overcome one man? Even if he happened to hold a gun, he could not concentrate on three people. There had to be such a thing as outnumbering a man and his gun.

But for Bradley, it all worked out. He had his way with them, and one thing became perfectly clear to the nurse: She was a cold fish, yes, and she knew it, but there was a line she'd never cross, and that line was defined by her job. Bradley, on the other hand, really saw nothing wrong in what he did- also because he merely did a job. And he never let his eyes off of anyone for very long. He was in perfect control.

"Kicks, Gregory."

"_What?_"

"Kicks, with the feet. I think we have almost reached a very promising level of exhaustion. But we should play it save, because I would hate to waste another orb. Try not to break anything, if possible."

Nurse Joy shut her eyes as a terrible little crack was followed by a desperate cry.

"Behind this door, there is someone being beaten up", Sullivan said with dread in his voice as Pete returned, waving a huge ring of keys, "I think I heard punches, kicks and some muffled talk."

"No way, we know she won't ever hurt someone, she's just not the type", Pete snapped back, mostly to comfort his senior. He sifted through the keys, cursing Silph's ancient rules about using real locks instead of nice, modern sliding doors with conveniently colour-coded key cards. Then he understood what he had just said. He fumbled with the door, almost breaking the key in the lock, but then he had it open and made a hasty grab for the handle. Sullivan held him back.

"Pete, you know that maybe there is nothing wrong at all, yes? You know that maybe Bradley just got curious enough to steal a little time for a chat or whatever."

"Yeah, and maybe he even brought some cake into a Gym."

"We are excited and nervous and more than a bit tense. And I am not very strong, and you can't move so well with that leg of yours, that is all I am saying. I said I heard a fight, but I am not exactly sure. We will need to see what's happening inside, and then we will need to act. Maybe, and I am just saying this out of fairness, we will even have to apologise to or, heaven help us, save Thomas."

Pete pulled at the door, again being held back.

"We must be careful in there, and I want to know what you are going to do with that baseball bat you have brought with you, Pete."

"Oh, well, that's… it just lay in the janitor's room, you know, collecting dust."

"That is one purpose of a baseball bat, yes."

"Yes. And, well, if Thomas really did nothing very strange and this is all one big misunderstanding, you know, we could have a small game… maybe? A game of, you know, baseball?"

"Ah. Another purpose of a baseball bat."

"I just feel a bit safer with a length of heavy wood in my hand, okay?"

"Very well. I always felt that is the _main_ purpose of a baseball bat." Sullivan sighed. An hour ago he had been looking forward to a productive day and some idle chat, a cup of tea and Tabitha's innocent helpfulness. Now things very clearly spun out of focus. There were so many things they should do- call for security, for example, or at least get a pager and see if they could reach Mrs. Joy. But his guts told him that in there, his applicant was in trouble, and that some complications would crop up as soon as they opened the door.

"Are you any good at hitting people?", he asked. Pete shrugged.

"If they stand very still and wait long enough for me to hobble over to them, yeah."

"We are going to get into trouble."

Andrew Sullivan opened what he later called Schroedinger's Door. Just like its box counterpart, it allowed for two options, and you wouldn't know which one was true until you checked.

Checking did take the two men about five seconds. After that, things started to happen very quickly, and talking time definitely was over.


	17. Chapter 17: Things Happening

**Things Happening In A Very Confusing Way**

Thomas Bradley realised too late that, while one outnumbered man with a gun in a closed room is able to control the situation just fine, he has to rely on trickery too much. He needs to keep an eye on everything and everyone. He needs to make himself appear very calm and powerful. He must rely on intimidation, unspoken threats and on none of the people outnumbering him wanting to risk either their lives, or the life of someone else. An outnumbered man with a gun who has his concentration broken, or who shows one moment of weakness, or who turns away from one of the people outnumbering him for just a bit too long is, essentially, outnumbered, and the gun doesn't matter anymore.

"Thomas!"

As soon as the Gym door slammed open and Pete gave an angry cry, Bradley's spell was broken. He turned around, quickly, and failed to shoot anybody, and that's when the five seconds of taking everything in had already passed, and things sped up.

Pete didn't see the gun. What he saw was Bradley standing in front of a boxing ring, the old nurse at his side, a security guard with his fists raised, and Tabitha on the ground. He sped forward and ignored his leg screaming at him, bat in his hand, and covered the few meters with quite some speed. _Then_ he saw the gun. A baseball bat might be able to lend a man some confidence, and as a weapon it looks quite impressive, but a gun has better range and looks just twice as threatening. Pete stopped so fast that his leg collapsed under him, and he fell heavily. Not that he would have had a chance to actually hit Bradley. He was already taken care of.

Gregory knew about the gun, but saw his chance and made a dash for the Librarian as soon as he had that one critical second. There was a lot of anger in the guard, and anger resulted in adrenalin, and adrenalin is a helpful thing in a man who has been trained to use it well. Bradley had his back to him just long enough, and Gregory jumped, wrapped his arms around the man, just as he had been trained, and grabbed his wrists and twisted. Awkward, but the light boxing gloves bend just enough. He heard the gun drop to the ground, kept twisting and pulling until he had the Librarian secured. He grunted, fighting the desire to pull just a little more and dislocate the man's arms. He doubted that anyone would blame him, but angry or not, Gregory had been trained never to lose control in such a situation, and felt a small pang of pride as he merely held the man secured and left it at that. He did not even sneer. Bradley hardly struggled.

Emily Joy had known about the gun the whole time, and when it fell, she once again avoided any cliché. She did not pick it up to point it shakily around and make a fool of herself, and she did not pick it up to fire it into the air. She merely took it, flipped the safety catch back on and then very calmly removed the magazine, which she pocketed. This, she decided, was how any rational person should have acted.

Then her job took over, cold fish or not, she was a nurse, and that was a profession that left a groove in your life. She tossed the empty gun away, took her medical bag and climbed into the boxing ring. The Carlyle woman was down on her back, sprawled on the ground like a really big spider that had been squashed by an extremely large shoe. She was sobbing. She was also bleeding. There was something about that combination that made the old nurse forget a lot of the things she disliked about people.

"Easy. It's over, Miss Carlyle", she said, her voice soothing. Then she broke out her equipment and did the best she could.

Sullivan had seen the gun, and hadn't cared. A stocky, flat-footed man in a lab coat and a black tie who runs like a very flustered chicken _should_ look funny, but Bradley saw a nemesis sweeping towards him. The Librarian wondered how things could have gone wrong so fast. He also wondered a bit about consequences. He shortly wondered if his arms were broken, and then Sullivan was right in from of him, red in the face but, this was important, still not looking funny. Sullivan was not a violent man, he just wasn't, and Bradley knew it, but all of a sudden, the Librarian understood the full meaning of the phrase "breaking point".

"Explain", Sullivan snapped, pointing towards the boxing ring where Mrs. Joy was already at work.

Things slowed down again.

Tabitha had never been severely beaten up before, but she had been horribly drunk once or twice. Both things had this in common: When you wake up, you instantly promise yourself never to let it happen to you again, ever.

Mrs. Joy was sticking plasters on her face. The sharp smell of disinfectant hung in the air. Grey skin or not, tomorrow she would be bruised all over, she just knew it. Tabitha groaned and pushed herself up with arms and back legs. Everything hurt, but she managed to support herself. She smiled, instantly regretting it as a crust on her lips broke open.

"Thanks", she mumbled, "Thank you."

"I am doing my duty, Miss Carlyle. Lie back, you are hurt, and I need to check your left arm."

Only now did Tabitha notice that she was no longer in the boxing ring. She'd been transported. So she _had_ fainted. The girl felt more than a bit ashamed of that, not knowing why. She sunk back. This was a small emergency room. She wondered where in the complex she was now. Maybe close to the laboratory again. She hoped so, she felt like crawling under her bed and stay there for a few days, licking her wounds.

"Where am I, and where is everybody? What's happened?"

"Doctor Sullivan and Mr. Myers have informed the gate security. Mr. Bradley is currently in detention. The security guard who beat you is waiting outside. And you are to lie still. You may have broken bones."

"Not so many bones to break anymore…"

"Unfortunately, I can only take care of the superficial bruises, but a doctor will be here shortly."

"Shortly? How long was I…"

"Hardly half an hour. Your supervisor will decide _when_ to call a doctor, obviously, and _whom_ to call, too. I don't like it that way, but you're patched up and should be good for the time being."

"I wanna see Doctor Sullivan… can I?", Tabitha said dreamily.

"Silly! Will you keep quiet please? I am allowed to give you an anaesthetisation, you know. That would keep your stupid mouth shut." But there was a small spark of respect in the woman's eyes, and Tabitha knew that she was safe here. And her body really wanted to relax. She nodded weakly, and the nurse cleaned up what blood there was, not saying anything more. When she was done, she merely stood there, gazing straight ahead, and Tabitha kept her stupid mouth shut and started to doze off.

After a while, she began to heal.

Thomas Bradley was not having an easy time, but he surprised Sullivan, Pete Myers and two security guards with a haughtiness fit for some major celebrity who just had been told that there would be no limousine and only one type of lobster salad.

"Listen, now…", he said, "There really was no other way to prove this myth, isn't that obvious? Do we have original capturing orbs and live pokemon? No. Do we have an apparently quite accurate reproduction of a capturing orb and a lab rat with pokemon genes? Yes. So of course I had to take advantage of the situation. There were many things to learn."

"Miss Carlyle is not a lab rat, Tom. If you can seriously call her that, I think we will have to wait for a psychiatrist before we continue."

Sullivan was beyond angry. Anger is risky and powerful, but the engineer felt serene and even a bit amused. He and Bradley sat at the opposites of one small table in the Library's front room. Two sturdy security guards flanked Bradley's chair, and Pete was standing behind Sullivan. It was a nice picture of superiority, Sullivan thought, slightly spoiled by the fact that Bradley happened to know a lot more then he, Sullivan, did, and had no apparent reason to share that knowledge. It was also the first time Sullivan and Pete were in Bradley's sanctuary- or at least in its anteroom. Pete had insisted on being let in. Out of sheer malice, admittedly- he felt The Librarian owned him at least one baseball bat hit.

"Andrew, you know how ridiculous you are. Is this here a normal situation? We are inside a large research facility. In about twenty minutes, it will open its doors, and a lot of workers will come in. People, busy, busy people. You do not have the time for private chat, Andrew. I demand to discuss my motives with the Silph board, and that's it."

"The board has no voice in my experiment."

"It has now. Because of what I thought to be a myth and what now seems to be very accurate history instead. All of a sudden, we are very, very useful. Andrew, I tell you, recreating some extinct animal is nothing, really nothing, compared to some of the technology I have read about!"

Sullivan had no trouble believing into what both the nurse and the guard have confirmed: That Bradley had tossed a metal orb at Tabitha, and that she had been turned into light and sucked into the ball for a couple of seconds before reappearing. He was able to believe in such a thing as advanced technology, but that didn't mean he had to embrace it.

"So you have deliberately withheld information", he said.

"You never even wanted to know about machines, Andrew! You were always asking for information about pokemon. Pokemon this, pokemon that, never the really interesting stuff!"

"It's not exactly easy to ask for something _you don't know about_."

"Is that important now? Andrew, this is stupid. This is stupid enough to be in a _movie_. Good Doc, Bad Doc? You are making all sorts of mistakes right now. This is not you. You should be back in your lab, cuddling your pet Ariados, and let the board take care of me. You think I acted wrong? Let the board decide. Because you can't. The whole research team is one round table. No ranks here, but I happen to be more senior than you." Bradley had not at any point of his rather impressive speech raised his voice. He had spoken in a confident monotone that really unnerved Sullivan.

"Very well", he finally said, "I will let our venerable superiors decide. But I will not leave now. I will be with you, Thomas. I will be with you all the way. And we will bring the board here, to let them see your stuff. I think you've created too much of a mystery dungeon here already." He turned around in his chair, addressing Pete. "Pete, would you please pick up that young man Gregory and then ask Mr. Warrington if he could spare me an hour? He's really a bit more powerful than the whole board, I dare say. You should maybe leave the bat here, by the way."


	18. Chapter 18: Making Things Simple

**Making Things Simple**

_Stupid_, Pete thought as he and Gregory made their way up into the offices of Silph's management. _Now we have messed up everything, really. Now it's all official._

He knew that his senior had taken great pains to make his project sound much more harmless than it was. When Pete had left a year ago to finally step out of Sullivan's shadow, the official "Mix explanation" had been that some sort of sac would form inside the host, in which a small amount of DNA-laden goo could be kept separated from the man or woman who was hosting it. It sounded grisly, but sufficiently harmless. Sullivan had always planned to put as much delay as possible between the successful application of the Mix and telling the board that he had even found a suitable host. In a perfect scenario, the board would have been informed about Tabitha's mere existence at some point in time when Sullivan would have already been ready to publish a first prototype base cure.

In truth, Pete had left the project mostly because he thought little of such techniques. It was all to common to go public and present a theory that secretly had been proven already, only to make the scientist in question look much more brilliant than he really was. This was, Pete had often complained, exactly an engineers approach: Say that something can be fixed in ten days when you know it will only take you two, and soon you are a living legend.

But theoretically, it _would_ have worked. Silph's management didn't take very much interest in most things the pokemon team did, and Sullivan had cranked out several little extra achievements just to obscure his real progress on the Mix even more. His genius had served Silph well, they had no reason to question him or to ask why they should pour more money into his research. When all was said and done, Sullivan constantly put a lot of money into Silph's coffers and never asked very much in return apart from some tea, sandwiches and, occasionally, top-grade technical equipment that was outlawed in several countries. Sullivan was harmless, and famous for it.

But now there would be hasty revelations, different takes on the same story, and- literally- two scientists in a room who just didn't get along very well.

Bradley had hard facts and claimed to be able to build machines from ancient blueprints that surpassed contemporary mechanisms. If he was speaking the truth, Silph would want to have these achievements. Machines were easy, they could be built and sold. You could give them a nice new chassis and a paint job every few years and sell them again for a higher price. You could get rich quick, if you got a nice machine.

Sullivan had a young woman who looked freaky and would maybe, _maybe_ reveal some probably really interesting… things, none of them directly profitable. And she would require food, a place to sleep and maybe would want to have a kitten.

Pete somehow knew how the board would side with exactly one of the two scientists, both of which would claim they'd done the right and sensible thing. But, he almost laughed, how would Bradley and Sullivan even start to explain their actions, and their results? "I have managed to turn a woman into a pokemon!" didn't sound any more ridiculous than "I have build a ball that can shrink and store living organisms!" What a funny old world we live in, he thought.

"Wow, I've never been up here", Gregory interrupted his meddled thoughts, "Do I go in there as a bad guy?" He pointed down a corridor. Unlike the corridors Pete considered as the "secret basement lab corridors that be spooky", this one was actually nice. Creamy white dominated. The Silph logo was prominent. The doors were made of actual wood. This was a corridor where important visitors were not so much a rare event but standard. Each door had a tasteful brass plaque, each one engraved with no more than two names. Down in the basements they had used sticky notes until Sandra Winters, who was a specialist for pokemon flora, had shouted "Argh!" very loud and then had gone rampage with some plastic sheets and a soldering rod. Not for the first time, Pete Myers felt very out of place.

"It's perfectly clear that you had no choice", he answered, meaning it, "We just need you to confirm what happened. Bradley will try to talk his way out of everything, he is the type. Have you ever met the big boss?"

"To be honest, I didn't even know we have only one."

"Oh, we do. One man at the top. An actual Sir, by the way, make sure you call him that. He's official."

"So you know him?"

"Hardly. He signed my leave last year, and gave me a handshake once. Doctor Sullivan knows him a bit, but I don't think that counts for a lot…"

"Please, I'd just like to know. That girl I met…"

"Tabitha."

"Yeah. I know a bit about what you guys are doing down there, with these dead animals. What is she?"

Pete was not in the mood to sum up the Mix project yet another time. Gregory really knew a bit already, having been assigned to guard the libraries, and that should be enough. So he merely shrugged and said: "Helpful to a fault."

Then they were at the door that lead into the office rooms of one of the most influential men of the world. His secretary made sure to remind them of that fact.

Silph as an institution equalled money, and money equalled power, and Silph's power was concentrated in the one man who owned Silph. It was a very old-fashioned way to organise things, but the whole of Silph Corporation belonged to Sir John Warrington the Fifth. The title alone made the average man feel a pang of pride to be in one room with him.

Warrington was the one man who, each time someone within the complex made a decent breakthrough, could start to count some more money.

He'd been pretty wealthy to start with, that should be said, and Silph had once been a family business rather than the one-man show it was today. Silph was also a devourer of smaller fishes- as soon as somewhere a certain interesting enterprise seemed to be ahead of its time, or just happened to be a bit weak on the financial side, it became part of Silph.

Pete had never liked the idea of a mega-concern, but Silph was almost the perfect example of such a structure. It was like three drunken octopi dancing a slow, complicated tango, arms stretching everywhere. And the pokemon research was just a tiny part of it, entangled in countless other research projects, advertising, philosophy, more advertising, money, power, internal struggles for a nicer office, some more money, and complicated documents wrapped in miles of red tape. It was very easy to get lost in such a dance, but as soon as the octopi realised you were there, well, there were arms all over the place to poke at you.

Warrington, however, seemed refreshingly unaware of the fact that, should he decide that cornflakes were supposed to be blue, corn crops all over the world would get a quick overnight paint job. He was carefully making his way past his forties, and he looked extremely likeable. Honest face, blond hair, green eyes with lots of crow's feet, very white teeth. He really looked like he could sell you the rainbow, and while he clearly had no idea who Pete even was, he didn't let this stop him.

"Dr. Myers, yes? Yes. Good morning. I have no idea why you are here. And what it is you do. Please tell me."

Pete did. He realised that he was not making a good job of it, Sullivan would've been much better at sounding calm, friendly and not like a total idiot. Gregory did his best to support him by adding a few even more ridiculous things to the tangled knot of science gone mad. Warrington, however, kept a friendly smile, nodded occasionally, and looked concerned whenever the descriptions seemed to require it. After about ten minutes he knew about the Mix in its fullness, about Tabitha, about Bradley's latest revelations, he knew about the improvised fight, and he took it all very well. Gregory, who was rather new to this job, found himself wondering if anyone within the complex would ever say something like "Hah, nice joke, that really can not happen!" But he found it reassuring that the man who was in charge did at no point laugh at them. He himself _had_ seen the capturing device in action, and he had punched a woman with mandibles and spider legs growing out of her back, and _he_ had a hard time believing any of it.

Then Pete was done, and Sir John Warrington leaned back in his comfortable chair, looking thoughtful but not exactly clueless.

"This", he finally said, "is very awesome. And very complicated. I like awesome, and I hate complicated. Awesome means great revenue, complicated means, well, complications."

"Doctor Sullivan would be very happy if you could find the time to meet us down in the basement libraries, Sir", Pete said, "I am of course aware that…"

"Let me say this aloud, please: Your team has succeeded in making a pokemon."

"Not exactly, no, more… a mixture… it's… she's technically… Yes. Sort of."

"And Bradley has this minimizing device, and it is functional."

"Apparently, yes, but…"

"We have an artificially created, unknown species and prototype technology that defies the laws of common sense _and_ physics."

"Er, yes, Sir. Definitely."

"I think we are all aware that this sounds like complete fantasy."

"Sir, please, what do we do now?" Pete really was at a loss. His leg hurt when he stood still for too long, and he was worrying about Tabitha, Sullivan and the whole mess of a situation. Warrington slowly leaned forward and pressed a button on his desk to talk to his secretary.

"I think", he said, "that I need to cancel all appointments for this morning. Please send my apologies to everyone who complains. I will be in the sub-levels for today. No, all of today. And I will require… three armed guards, and also Miss Anderson from the advertisement department. They are to meet me at the extinct flora and fauna research library." He paused, and looked at the two men in front of him with a strange smile.

"I will now show you how to make complicated things very simple indeed." He stood up and straightened his tie. "And it won't take me long."


	19. Chapter 19: Breaking Points

**Breaking Points**

The Library was forced open. It was a sight Pete and his senior would remember forever- Bradley standing in front of the doors, caught between reserved pride and nervous fear. Warrington walked in, followed by two of his armed guards, an eager woman who carried a bulky suitcase, and finally, Bradley. Apart from them, nobody was allowed into the inner sanctum of the pokemon record storage, any nobody was allowed to leave, which meant that Pete Myers, Gregory Hayes and Andrew Sullivan were left in the custody of the third armed guard. They were allowed a sandwich when it became clear that the visit to the Library would take a while. Eventually, Warrington's group returned. There was a certain smugness in Bradley's eyes.

Then Sullivan's laboratory was visited. This time, instead of Bradley, Andrew Sullivan was allowed to come with Warrington's select team, and unlike Bradley he did so with careful optimism. Again, the rest of the group was left in custody. There were no sandwiches this time. Even more, the one guard left behind made it clear that even talk would not be tolerated. Talking time was over. And when Warrington, his team in tow, came out of the laboratory, Sullivan clearly was not in the mood for talk anyway. He was dejectedly looking at the floor and seemed, for the first time ever, speechless and worried. Too worried to even make a dry joke.

Warrington and one guard then squeezed into the small emergency station where Mrs. Joy was still watching over Tabitha. Despite all protests the young woman was woken up, and then Mrs. Joy was sent away to make room for the woman with the complicated suitcase. Time passed, and when Warrington left this time, his guard lead Tabitha in front of him. She'd been handcuffed, and she was in tears. When Tabitha came past Sullivan, she turned ever so slightly, and her back limbs spread to touch the old man. She was pushed away quickly, gave a muffled whimper, and was led god knew where.

Warrington remained in the basement. He still had things to organise, and breaking the research team was only the first thing he did.

The board arrived. People flooded the corridors. Within one day, Silph clamped down heavily on the research project. Doors were opened. Data and prototypes were secured. Even the lab rat with the bushy clump of leaves growing out of its head was found, labelled, named Jack, and taken away. Warrington kept his word and made things very simple indeed- by taking everything away from everyone. When he left the basement labs late in the evening, nobody who was even able to spell "pokemon" owned anything the research team had achieved. They didn't even own the ideas in their own heads. From now on, these rights belonged to Silph alone, and thus to Sir Warrington. He was in control now. People would obviously be allowed to keep their jobs, and their bills would be met, and they would have something to return to. But the round table had been taken away, and there was now one person who was at the very definite head of the new table, which would be a bit smaller. He was the one everyone would answer to from now on.

After defining the new Status Quo, Warrington surprised Andrew Sullivan by allowing him to return home overnight. The owner of Silph Corporation was aware that the engineer had a wife waiting for him, and pointed out that the security guard who'd accompany Sullivan, and who'd take position somewhere near his home for the whole night, and who was carrying a weapon, was a mere formality. Without much hope Pete asked if he could stay with his senior, and to his surprise he was allowed to. It probably meant that nobody had to find another guarded weapon to come with _him_, thus saving Warrington some money.

Aware that things had gone really unexpectedly wrong at some point, both men walked away in silence. Behind them, the weapon that was carried by a well-paid and loyal guard kept a decent distance but remained present all the time. It wasn't that there was anywhere for Sullivan and his assistant to run to, or even to run from. It was a mere detail, as Warrington had made clear, but a bit later that night, it would turn out to be the sort of detail that wrecks complicated gambits.

Sullivan and Pete didn't know about this yet, and so they merely made their way to the doctor's small house, where the engineer greeted and kissed his wife, lead his assistant in, sat down, drank a cup of very strong tea, and then- reaching a personal breaking point he hadn't been aware of- prepared some words and broke the pact.

Tabitha was alone in a grey room, and she was frightened. She was also, for the very first time since her changing into an Ariados, fully aware of her status as a test subject. Sullivan had, shortly after her transformation, realised that Silph no longer had a valid contract on her, but she had not minded back then. Sir Warrington, as he had himself introduced to her, had resurrected the contract. Silph owned her body, and everybody was free to do pretty much anything with it as long as it was done in the name of science.

This included strapping the body to a bed. Mechanical restraint was really just a polite word for being tied up in a professional manner. The medical staff had insisted that she possessed natural weapons, too, and had carefully put plastic covers over her horn and her mandibles. Amputation had been mentioned, and that had been her breaking point. But she had been too confused to struggle, and only now realised that even the slightest sign of resistance would've been very stupid. Her body, already bruised and aching, had then been poked and cut and scraped and… analysed. At some point, she had shut her eyes and started to cry, but to no effect. Well, someone _had_ sampled her tears.

Now she was alone, and was grateful for being left alone, and hoped that people would _leave_ her alone. A single naked bulb lit the room, the cold white light preventing her from getting any sleep. So she thought instead, as bodies do when they are otherwise restrained. For all that had happened today, she still didn't feel _outstandingly_ bad, physically. Apparently the Ariados really had been a tough little bugger, and she had inherited some of that toughness. She was pretty sure that some bruises were already fading into the grey of her skin. She should be hurting all over, but she didn't. There were still marks, yes. But she didn't actually feel as if she had been thoroughly beaten, and had she been able to move, she would have done so without too much pain.

But being _physically_ okay was no substitute for being happy and content and thinking of kittens. It was no substitute for being able to move either. Maybe bodies could do quite well with the odd bit of pain as long as there was a mental fluffy blanket to snuggle up to. But she didn't have one.

Tabitha was scared senseless. She was afraid of many, many people right now. She was afraid to die. She was also aware that, as long as no-one came to untie her, she had no chance to defend herself at all. And how she wished she could defend herself! She wished that Sullivan or Pete or even Mrs. Joy were here. She wished she had not been so over-eager to get herself into this whole mess. She wished she knew why her cheeks ached so much.

But mostly, she wished she could move.

Thomas Bradley wondered if there was a guardian angel for people like him, for people who chased the truth and were not afraid to cross certain borders. There had to be. This day had been full of rewards. But he was not happy.

He was currently in one of the very secure guest rooms of Silph Corporation. And yes, he was in detention, with a man guarding his door and with a small record of legal issues he would have to answer to. He had stolen potential revenue from Silph when he had not instantly revealed his discoveries about pokemon technology. He had also, without permission, borrowed equipment from a co-worker, but that was more of a slight offence. And he had damaged Silph property by allowing to get the recreated Ariados wounded. That was a major issue, probably the one Warrington took the most offence at. And Bradley knew that he had done these things.

But that was _it_, really. He had, by the highest authorities, been relieved from his responsibilities as Librarian, and tomorrow he'd be judged and handed over to the slow mills of Britain's justice system. Just as Sullivan had known, Silph did not take kindly to employees doing free studies in their own time. But Sullivan had spliced genes and played his silly little games. All he, Bradley, had done was tinkering with machinery, and he had been so very close to get some results at last. In his mind the Gladiator myth, now no longer a tale but a record of actual events, held so many promising little facts. The capturing orbs. The strange loyalty pokemon developed as soon as they were caught. Radiation stones. A system of crude devices that could transport matter. With the power of pokemon as a resource, these ancient people had created some astonishing machines indeed.

Warrington had been interested in Bradley's discoveries. He was a businessman, and a good businessman always follows the smart money. Machines were smart money. And indeed: Before the owner of Silph Corporation had left Bradley alone, he had carefully indicated that, once Bradley had been judged and made good on his crimes, there would be a new position for him. Artefact Technology Research, he had called it.

That really was enough to break a man. He'd be away from Silph for a while. A month, maybe? Two? That was too much time for Warrington's team to meddle. And maybe Sullivan would talk his way back into Silph's embracing arms, too. Bradley could see, very clearly, a certain breaking point here. He could accept Warrington's treatment, and come back later to find a lot of things lost forever. Or he could play his trump card, and walk away from Silph with everything he needed.

It was not a tough decision. Very slowly, he walked to the door, and knocked, and when the guard came, Bradley said in a brittle voice: "I wonder if I could get a drink of water, please." And he was old. The guard was young, and he had a weapon. When the door opened, Bradley hit as hard as he could.

Warrington had made things simple indeed by bringing power to a point. But a sufficiently desperate scientist can always create his own complications.


	20. Chapter 20: Haunted Technology

**Haunted Technology**

_Treasure hoard_, thought Bradley when he carefully let himself into the storage room. Warrington really was a businessman, he loved to see all his future revenue stacked in neat piles in exactly one place. He was practical, too, and had actually stored all the data, all the prototypes, all the notes his men had scoured from the research department- in a room still located in the lower basements. In the samples room, where the dead pokemon were already stored. It made sense, and it added to the moment of triumph Bradley was currently experiencing.

He couldn't turn back now. He had, he was numbly aware, just killed a man. Killed, he repeated to himself. Strangely enough, it did not make him feel very guilty. He had not intended to kill, had not even known he was strong enough to break a neck, but it had happened. It seemed of little importance: Now Bradley had a while to do whatever he needed to do, and if everything worked out as planned, he would not have killed. Warrington himself would pay the lawyers to hide this little detail.

Bradley scanned the room, taking everything in. He didn't need long to notice a certain pattern: Warrington's movers had already sorted their bounty. There were three neat piles.

Crates and boxes held the documents and relics that had belonged to his Library. He would need not too many of them. It was a bit sad that he'd leave the originals behind, but all these documents had already been scanned and stored on bulky external drives long ago. These still took up one large box. He tried to lift it, and found that he could easily carry it. Even better, there were a couple of gym bags in one corner of the room, maybe left by the workers. Very convenient. That meant that he could take his complete Library with him.

Sullivan's property was next, a messy collection. Bradley was not familiar with it, and wasn't too sure about the contents. There was a small box of drives, there were several ring binders, bulging with papers, sticky notes and drawings. That was, Bradley figured, the documentation for the Mix, and maybe more. He dug trough the boxes and grinned cheerfully when he noticed an isolated suitcase with a code lock- which easily opened to Sullivan's date of birth. Some genius he was! And inside… yes. If Bradley remembered what he knew about the Mix correctly, this was the base formula, ready to receive donator genes from dead pokemon. And it was a rather small suitcase. That meant that Bradley could walk away with his Library and the Mix, and the formula for the Mix.

Would Sullivan have private backups? Bradley doubted it. Silph took care that documentation remained in-house. There were restrictive clauses in every employees contract, and Sullivan was the type to obey such rules. Bradley quickly checked the labels on the drives. Yes. Mix, everything from the first prototype to the final formula. All he needed was the suitcase and three of the bulky external drives, and he would leave Sullivan powerless. Or at least throw him back noticeably.

And the bag still was light enough to be carried comfortably.

The third pile formed a mess of jumbled documentation that had little to do with translation or Mix technology. Most of the team had merely tried to prove or extend discoveries made by Bradley and, recently, Sullivan, and their derivative work had been secured in a sad big pile of knowledge. There was all the data covering the tests, there were several handwritten theories and clever yet dull guesswork. Nothing of that was of real interest to Bradley, and admittedly, he doubted he could carry very much of it too. But he wanted, he really wanted…

He found what he wanted. There was his collection of capturing orbs, and a set of smaller equipment he had started to work on. How much did he dare to take? He really needed a few well-crafted capturing orbs, and they were small and light, easy to carry. He put a dozen or so into the bag's side pockets. Out of the strange urge to simply own them, he also selected several of the ancient orbs and heaped them into his bag. He felt that they were really important, without being able to say why. He found the box with the radiation stones, each one engraved with a symbol that represented a certain element. There were only six. Apparently they had been rare enough to begin with, and they seemed to affect pokemon in some way. Bradley shook his head. Heavy, and rather large- they were dead weight, and he left them behind without too much regret.

In its cage that was part of the orb machine, he found his pokemon. Bradley had not been able to believe his luck: When Warrington had forced the Library open, the small creature had been resting. Sleeping, or whatever a steel ball did when it was exhausted. And then Bradley had been ordered to shut the orb machine down, and the pokemon had had no reason to wake up any time soon. It looked like a metal ball, even more now that his eyes were shut. Nobody had noticed that it was a living thing, because everybody knew that living things are _not made of metal_.

Did he want to take the pokemon with him? That was a foolish question: He needed it. It was a power source that made ancient technology work. But it was alive, and Bradley knew it was very energetic when awake. His eyes darted this way and that, and finally found a small coffer that held some Pikachu bones. He tossed them out, took the small pokemon from its cage…

And stopped dead.

He had never touched the beast with his bare hands, he realised. He had used thongs when he had handled it, or at least made sure to wear gloves. Now his skin felt the slightly warm metal, felt the tiniest contraction of the orb as it… breathed? And it felt the touch, too, and opened its eyes.

Spellbound, Bradley raised it close to his face, and stared. The pokemon blinked, and that alone looked very alien, the metal moving as if it was liquid and perfectly mobile. Then the small thing emitted a low-pitched hum. Apparently it felt quite comfortable being held by a human. Strange- inside its cage it had always been bouncing and hissing. Now it purred like a cat that amicably accepted a pat on the head. Bradley moistened his lips. He was aware that he was wasting time, but couldn't resist now to say, "There… hello. You know me, right?"

The pokemon opened a narrow slit under its eyes. Bradley hadn't even known there was a mouth in the thing, and then realised that it wasn't a mouth. It was like a capturing orb opening at the hinge. He figured he could see a dim red glow inside, a swirling movement.

Instinct took over, and he grabbed the halves of the… thing, pulling hard. The pokemon gave an angry shriek, but Bradley had a firm grip on it and didn't let go. A static discharge ran through his fingers: The thing really had electricity build into its body! But he pulled, and then, there was a sharp pop, and a zigzagging flash of red light. There was… a pokemon inside… a pokemon. This small living ball of metal was both a living thing and a capturing orb! Bradley stared as the red glow pulled itself together to a strange shape, now bright white and glowing like so many neon lights. And then the glow faded, and the shape became more solid. How, thought Bradley, could this even be?

He realised that he might be in danger. But Bradley shared the common human trait of being far to curious for his own good. And he was a researcher, after all. He squared his shoulders, and watched a pokemon reassuming its true form.

It was… ugly. When the glow had faded away completely, the pokemon in front of Bradley turned out to be the most unsettling thing he had ever seen. It was dark, almost black, with a tint of midnight purple. In the dim light of the sample storage, it would have been almost invisible, were it not for an eerie glow that surrounded its body- as if a purple mist constantly flew away from it. It was not too tall, but it floated in the air. Its body was basically a chubby cone that flattened at the top and came to a point at the bottom. Spikes at the side of what technically had to be the creature's head gave it the appearance of a horned, ruffled animal. Its eyes were glowing white, almost triangular and far too big for the compact body. Just below the eyes, a wide mouth fell open and formed an evil pumpkin grin. The thing had teeth like razors. It turned around, apparently confused by its surroundings, then its eyes fixed on Bradley. The leering mouth opened still more: The thing really was only a floating head. It cackled with a hollow, high-pitched voice, and suddenly it had hands- four-fingered, crude hands floating at its sides, not connected to the body but clearly part of the pokemon.

Bradley's mind raced. He had been the only one who knew that there had been a few types of pokemon that had left no traces on the surface of Earth. They were mentioned in several documents though: One of them was the "ghost" type. Bradley had scoffed at the idea at first- again, people seemed to try to make up their own explanations for things they couldn't explain rationally. Ghost tales were really all too common to be taken seriously.

Now, however, he was pretty sure that he _saw_ a ghost pokemon. It was even a bit transparent. And he knew its name. It had been in the Gladiator's Journey. There had been one remarkable description of a fight where one Gladiator had used the first captured ghost type ever, and this was it.

"You… are a Haunter", Bradley said.

The beast lowered its hands and narrowed its eyes.

"I released you from the capturing orb", Bradley said, not sure what else to say, "I think you are my pokemon, because I owned your orb. You are mine."

The Haunter hovered on the spot, hands down, its eyes never leaving Bradley. The Librarian, however, looked at the now empty ball on the ground. It was silent, and did no longer move. Was it… dead? Sleeping? And did that matter? He had more orbs!

"It must be so", Bradley insisted, "I owned your orb. By all your rules, I am your… Gladiator. I own you. You are mine."

The pokemon quickly dashed forward, making the man flinch, and two bright, glowing eyes filled Bradley's vision. The gaping mouth of the Haunter stank of marsh gas and rotten earth. Dreamily, the man counted exactly eight sharp, jagged teeth.

"I am your Gladiator, right? I give you orders. You obey. That's what pokemon do."

There was a hiss, but then the beast gently drifted away from him, twisted in the air, apparently enjoying its freedom. It turned to Bradley again, and its jagged mouth formed a true smile this time.

"Haunter", it screeched, "Haunter!"


	21. Chapter 21: The Plot Slideshow

**The Plot Slideshow**

Pete was not a family man, and he would have felt as if he intruded on the Sullivan's private time if there had been such a thing. Andrew had, in calm, soft tones, explained to his wife what he had actually been doing for Silph. This was complicated, because he first had to explain what he had wanted to do, then what he had done, and then what had actually been the result. Pete had waited in the living room while the elderly couple had talked in the kitchen.

He knew Emma because he had been there when Andrew had married her, and he'd also been at the hospital when the woman had lost her legs. So he was not the least surprised when she remained calm, comforted her husband and gently called him, Pete, in to join them at the table. You could build a house on Emma Sullivan, she was so steadfast. And she asked very few questions, but when she did, they all hit hard.

"What will happen to Miss Carlyle?" That was the first one.

Well, that was up to Silph's board now. Because of Warrington, there now was an actual adhesion contract. Both men exchanged an uncomfortable glance.

"I can not say", Andrew said.

"You won't let her come to harm, right?", came the second question.

"I can not protect her, dear. I do not have a voice in that any more."

"I repeat myself, you won't let her come to harm, right?"

"We won't", Pete said, "We will meet Mr. Warrington tomorrow first thing in the morning, and we still have some rights, Emma. The Doc has earned Silph hard money for years. I'm not so bad either. There are people who owe us. We can call in a few favours. Tabby will be all right." He himself did not believe that feeble line, and neither did the couple.

"She will be kept confined, and she will be treated like some freak", the woman said, "We know that, don't we? Tests, isolation, no rights."

"No, we don't know that, because… well, we just do not know", Pete insisted, "I know it's easy to think that way, but… yeah, right, we _do_ know that. It's what makes the best drama. Break the cutie, or something. Do you have a beer, Emma? I could really do with one."

"Fridge, Pete. Bring a round", said his senior, "It's time to get drunk and lose all faith."

"No", said Emma softly, "It's not. It's time to think, and do something."

"Dear, there is nothing we can do. If anything, Bradley's out of it as well as we are. The Mix now belongs to Warrington, personally, and all we can hope for is that he doesn't ape my mistakes."

"Ah. And what would a powerful man with a formula that can actually change people into half an extinct animal do? No, really, I am just asking."

Make more, thought Bradley, that would be the first thing he would suggest. He watched the Haunter as it playfully floated around the room. The Ariados woman was the living proof that a human _could_ take on a pokemon's abilities. She had reportedly healed much faster than should be humanly possible. She had responded to the capturing orb. That was a _start_. Maybe the Mix could be improved to make the changes even more effective.

Select better, that would be the next suggestion. Pokemon came in so many different shapes and types. What about the Vulpix mummy they had found? Vulpix had a fire sac- it was a fox with the ability to breathe fire. The Sandshrew had a skin composed of extremely hard, almost brick-like material, but flexible. You didn't need to read a lot of bad fiction to come up with military uses.

And get creative, that was the crown jewel. Bradley was, much to his pride, not a creative man, but Warrington employed a fleet of advertisers and daydreamers who could sell you the time of the day in twenty different colours. Mix and match. Select from several pokemon the most interesting, powerful, useful features, and recreate them in one human body.

He was sweating. His initial plan had been simple: Get as much backup documentation as possible, then destroy the rest. Blackmail and threaten Warrington. Threaten to release his discoveries to the highest bidder… as long as he didn't belong to Silph, however long it would take to find such a bidder. Warrington would have had no other choice but to pay someone to clear Bradley's slate and beg him to return, on his own terms.

It had been a flawed plan indeed, and Bradley realised that he was clearly improvising where precise calculation should have taken place. But the last few minutes had given him a powerful tool- a pokemon that accepted him as his owner. It had accepted him tossing one of the new capturing orbs at it, had been swallowed by it, and then he had released it again. It was his pokemon.

He had a ghost that would fight for him. Now, what could it do?

"There's not much Warrington can do, not without us. He needs either Bradley or me, even if he gets a whole fleet of clever lads it will take them a while to even understand half of what I did. And what Bradley did, well, that should be complicated too. I'm not too fond of machines, but I heard they are tricky. Things break down all the time, or something."

"And that means?", asked his wife.

"That means Warrington will need one of us back. Warrington wants to get a use out of Miss Carlyle, he needs me. Warrington wants to toss balls at people, he needs Bradley."

"And you wouldn't toss a capturing ball at the young lady, naturally."

"Dear, I wouldn't even toss a marshmallow at her, because she would eat it and I wouldn't have a marshmallow then. But this is all idle chat, you know? We are merely relieving stress here."

"It seems to do you some good."

"But it's futile. We merely toss around known facts and wait for something to happen…"

At that point, there was a knock on the door. Andrew Sullivan didn't miss a beat: "Which is now. Obviously. I had that planned, you know. I have the most amazing door in the whole of London. It's a plot door. They cost extra. Please open, Pete."

Bradley left the door open. The bulging gym bag over his shoulder, the Haunter at his side and the empty capturing orb in his hand, he slowly made his way through the basement corridors. He was thinking hard.

He had a pokemon now. It was a very strange but exciting feeling: He had the most loyal protection in the world now. He had refreshed his memory by reading the one chapter about the Haunter duel again, and he had ordered the floating beast to walk through a wall, to turn invisible, to summon a small, buzzing projectile and hurl it into the crates and boxes. These techniques had been mentioned in the Gladiator's Journey. The Haunter had not been able to turn invisible, and Bradley suspected that pokemon did not necessarily share the same abilities across a type. When he had ordered the ghost to destroy as much in the room as possible, however, the Haunter had seriously gone berserk. It had been a fearful sight- the jagged, shaggy shape of darkness moved smoothly and very fast, slashed at boxes, smashed wood and metal, and all the while cackled and howled. It obviously enjoyed to destroy things, and when it had been done, it had returned to his side, grinning evilly. His left hand, Bradley had noticed, was slightly larger than the right one, and seemed to glow a bit brighter, to a point where the purple tint became a deep red.

"You have stopped", he had said, "Is there something else you can do? You seem to enjoy this sort of behaviour."

"Haaaaaaaaaaunt", the thing had howled- it had sounded very approving.

"Yes, have fun. Show me… let me see your strongest attack."

The Haunter's eyes had grown wide, and its mouth had dropped open. An unnaturally long, flat tongue had become visible, and the beast had smacked its lips happily. Then it had raised its hands above its head and started to howl. The misty fog that forever seemed to pour from its body had grown thicker, and Bradley had felt a chill. The Haunter's mouth had grown even larger, it had seemed as if the whole thing was made of teeth and tongue, and then it had choked up a stream of mist. Purple flames had appeared all over the wreckage. The room had been lit purple within minutes.

That had been minutes ago, and behind him, Bradley knew, there were only ruins. The sample storage was on fire, the secured data inside was destroyed. There were still the results of many years of research, and they were in his bag, and he would not let go of it now.

"That was impressive", he said as man and ghost pokemon reached the elevator, "That was really impressive. Cold fire."

"Teeeer", the thing drawled, almost smugly.

"You are only to do this when I order you to, is that understood?"

"Haun-ter." Did it agree? Did it even comprehend? Bradley had never owned a pet but knew that people always said things like, yes, my dog understands every thing I say. This seemed to be a similar situation: The Haunter understood him, however limited its intelligence would have to be. It could only use its name, or syllables of its name, as a crude language. But it seemed to communicate its general agreement with the way he treated it. A bit like a trained pet, really. But instead of fetching sticks, his pet could wreck havoc and walk through walls. And to think that Sullivan, the old fool, had made himself a girl with two extra legs that were no use. He stopped in his tracks.

Did he dare to finish the thought? The Haunter, perfectly silent, turned to watch its owner. Its eyes were glowing faintly. The elevator doors, as if controlled by a higher sense for dramatic events, slid open, and a nurse, a total stranger to Bradley, gasped as she saw the man and the pokemon. The Librarian finished the thought and made a decision.

"Good evening. May we?", Bradley said and stepped in. The Haunter followed and watched the young woman. There was hunger in its eyes.

"Where are you stopping?", the Librarian asked cheerfully, "You are not- by accident- checking on the Ariados prototype, are you?"

She nodded, ever so slightly. The doors closed. Bradley's finger hovered over the buttons.

"Where to?"

"Two down, sir…"

"Ah, obviously." Bradley pushed the button and pursed his lips. "I think we shall enter a duel now, what do you think?"

The Haunter looked up, greed in its eyes. It growled happily.


	22. Chapter 22: Villain Cliché

**Villain Cliché**

"First I got an emergency call from the night shift", the guard explained quickly as he hurried across the street, "Mister Warrington is already informed, and he will arrive soon, but then a nurse made another call, and I really do not know what to do now! I've been called back, and…"

"Okay, but what has happened?", asked Pete, struggling to keep up, "And why does nobody here have a car, damned?"

"And how did you know exactly _when_ to knock at my door, that will keep me awake for a few nights, you know?", Andrew Sullivan added. The guard- now really just a worried man, weapon and position forgotten- almost wailed.

"There's a fire down in the basement labs, I was told, and Bradley, I don't know, he did it, or something. And then a nurse said he had a strange creature with him and…"

"Strange creature? Not one with… more legs than usual, but otherwise quite well-behaved apart from a strange obsession with tenta…"

"A ghost, she said. She was totally besides herself. And there are guards wounded! That thing is biting them! Please, I thought maybe you could do…"

"We've been fired!", Pete shouted, gritting his teeth and cursing his leg, "You are to guard us so that we don't run away, and now you lead us… to help you guys?"

"Very good thinking", Sullivan murmured, "That makes us officially the good guys. Should be worth something. Hurry, Pete. It's really no distance at all."

"Doc, I…"

"Pete, you will not fail me now. Ghost? Biting? That's not Miss Carlyle. I figure Thomas still has some secrets. And he touched my things. Again!"

"Can we please hurry?", shouted the guard.

"Can we please get a cab?"

"Good evening, Miss Carlyle."

Tabitha lifted her head. In front of her, slightly hidden in the shadows of the corridor, stood Thomas Bradley. He looked tired. His face was sunken. He had a deep scratch on the forehead. But his eyes were bright, as if he was bursting to tell her about a really interesting book he had just read. It would be a book with many complicated words, she though. And she wouldn't have a chance to run away.

"Leave me alone", she mumbled, "Please. Please leave me alone."

He walked up to her. Tabitha flinched as he reached out and patted her on the head. She hissed angrily at him.

"I won't leave you alone, Miss Carlyle. Or may I call you Tabitha? Tabby, maybe?"

"Don't you _dare_ call me Tabby!"

"I was hoping to find you in a better mood, you know."

Tabitha gave up. She forced herself to relax. There was no use denying it, she was bound like some distressed damsel in damsel-icious distress, and a man who wasn't very nice thought it fun to lecture her. She could make a fool out of herself by struggling helplessly, or she could remain still and at least deny him the satisfaction of looking ridiculous. She opted for being the cool damsel.

"What do you want, then?"

"I have acted unwise", he said, as if entrusting her with a shameful secret, "I have single-handedly destroyed all evidence of the pokemon research. I have set the basement on cold fire. I have… hurt people. Only that it wasn't me, you know? I wonder if the Gladiators felt like this, too. Knowing that they had allies that were so powerful and… loyal."

Being a cool damsel seemed very, very hard, but Tabitha did her best.

"If there was a fire, Mister Bradley, wouldn't there be some sort of alarm? I saw sprinklers all over the corridors."

"It is cold fire that burns without smoke. It is ghost fire. I dare say it will cause a lot of destruction before it is even noticed."

The man was, Tabitha realised, not mad or broken or whatever the evil guy is supposed to be in order to have his motives justified. He was just seeing things a bit different from other people. She tugged hard at her fetters. He noticed and smiled.

"You are the last bit of evidence that could aid Sullivan, you know? If you have a functional machine, you can reverse-engineer it. If you have a prototype, you can backtrack your work. Do you realise how important you are to the good doctor?"

Cool time was definitely over. Tabitha had a very clear idea what would happen next, and she trashed when the man leaned forward and held a capturing orb in front of her face.

"Don't be afraid. This is not to capture you, Miss Carlyle. It is already occupied."

"What…"

"I have made a very interesting friend, one that renders you obsolete. I think I owe it a bit of entertainment. And I would like to briefly check some facts. These orbs are astonishing. I think they really define a pokemon's role. A tool, ready to be whipped out when it is needed. They are built for loyalty, really. All it takes is a small orb, and you control them. I will not lie, I do not think that you would behave the same way. Your genes are mixed. Humans are not naturally subservient, except for when they are."

"Let me…"

"Yes, me, me, _me_. Miss Carlyle, this is not about _you_."

"Then stop all that stoopid talk and say what you want", she groaned.

"Ah, finally some spirit. Well, Miss Carlyle… I am challenging you. To a duel. A pokemon fight." He stepped back, and twisted the orb in his hand, and in a zigzag of light, his loyal Haunter appeared at his side. Tabitha gawped as the ghost pokemon cackled and floated right above her. Just like Bradley, she saw a very ugly thing. But it also looked… familiar. It was a predator shape.

"Ter", it growled.

"Do you understand what it says?", Bradley asked conversationally. Tabitha was this close to going ever so slightly mad.

"No", she said, hoarsely, "Sir, this…"

"This is a real pokemon. A Haunter. Ghost type. A floating, mostly gaseous being. Very loyal, and it seems to like me a lot. Apparently every pokemon instantly likes its owner. And now, you will fight."

"No. No! You can't be serious! Sir, this…"

He sighed. Then he spoke, and his voice became more angry with every word.

"Miss Carlyle, the reasonable thing would be to capture you, and take you with me. In a small orb that fits my pocket, do you understand what I am saying? I happen to have several of these orbs. I made them myself. It would be very easy for me to take one, right, and smack it into your stupid pretty face! You are exhausted and beaten, and I bet you couldn't break free from it another time. And then I could simply forget about that orb. Isn't that a nasty thought? I could simply forget that I have it, I could even accidentally lose it, you see? And that would be the end of you!"

Bradley was shouting. Tabitha wondered if the world had gone mad, or if someone had given her medicine that made her see things, but as the man's voice grew louder, the floating thing over her seemed to glow. It looked so evil. Spiders were supposed to be a bit icky, but the Ariados had looked harmless and nice compared to this triangular face with the glowing eyes and the evil grin. Had this happened before? Had there ever, in some ancient dark forest, been Haunters preying on sheepdog-sized insects with legs on their back? What a thought.

And Bradley was still not done shouting.

"Instead, I am offering you a fight! And do you know what, I do not think you will be a match for me and my pokemon! I really think we will utterly beat you! I will then go, and you will be dead, and I will have everything and Sullivan will have nothing! Now let's do this!" Bradley was raging now. Whatever fine line he had been walking, he was losing it now. The Haunter howled as it picked up its owner's excitement. The triangular eyes were burning bright, and its tongue lolled. It turned around as if waiting for a last sign of confirmation.

"Go for it, Haunter", the Librarian said coldly, "Beat this sad excuse of a pokemon."

Pete made a mental note to never pet dogs again. His leg was on fire. So was his mind. Silph Corporation, as a building, was supposed to be boring. Tasteful, yes, expensive, sure, a bit too large to be comfortable, indeed, but it was supposed to be a boring dead structure. And it still was, until they reached the lower basements. Down there, it was bustling chaos.

There were security guards everywhere, and while one solitary security guard is normally a sign of things being well and okay, a large group of them, some wounded, some trying to extinguish flames with blankets, and all of them shouting, somehow failed to make anyone feel very secure.

Sullivan was better at catching up with the events and gave a running comment as he lead his assistant and their personal security guard through the chaos. "He has really taken care of everything. Knocked out his guard. Killed him. Then he destroyed all our work. I bet I know what he's going to do now. Sir, do you know where the Ariados is kept?"

"What's an Ariados?"

"Has Warrington ordered detention for anyone? Are your mates to patrol a certain area?", Sullivan checked, "Has anyone mentioned someone crying my name a lot?"

"Doc…"

"_Yes, me, me, me. Miss Carlyle, this is not about you!"_

The men stopped. That had been nearby. Sullivan tried to get his bearings, he was not too sure where exactly they needed to go, but that voice had been nearby.


	23. Chapter 23: Pokemon Recall

**Pokemon Recall**

In the (considerably sparse) theatre of his mind, Bradley had tried to imagine what a true pokemon duel would have looked like. The documents, for all their purple prose, usually described them as a very technical affair: The Gladiators called out moves, and the pokemon promptly obeyed their orders and apparently never did anything of their own free will, accepting damage as if they were pawns in a game of chess. Even Bradley had not quite been able to believe that- when animals fought, such a discipline seemed highly unlikely. An animal fighting an animal was messy, he knew, there could be no fair play when the fighters had no concept of "being fair". Animals were not noble savages. And pokemon, whatever fancy names they tooted, were animals. He knew he was correct.

But the Haunter, apparently trying to contradict him, did not attack the Ariados no matter what Bradley ordered. It just hung in the air, eyed its owner with a slightly angry look, and gnashed its teeth. The Ariados girl, ready to be slashed, was sweating and wincing but had not even been touched by the ghost pokemon.

"I order you to fight", he repeated, and again the Haunter merely stared.

"'nter", it rumbled.

"You are mine", Bradley insisted, "You already hurt people for me, and this one is an Ariados! It's a pokemon, like you, only impure. You are to fight it. Isn't this what you are all about?"

He became aware of a slight change. The girl had stopped whining.

There was a perfect pause, the length of a heartbeat.

Then Andrew Sullivan's deep voice shattered it: "It seems that your pokemon, Thomas, would rather like to have a fair fight."

The elderly engineer stood in the doorframe, casually pointing at the gym bag that held Bradley's treasure. He was alone, the Librarian realised with glee, he was alone and outnumbered. He was all on his own. But he, Bradley, had a pokemon, and once again the man wondered if that was a Gladiator's thought: Whatever mess I am in, I am not alone. I can rely on my pokemon's power and loyalty. And indeed the Haunter eagerly turned its back to the Ariados and blinked at Sullivan, who sighed and put his hands into his pockets.

"Good evening, Miss Carlyle", he said softly. Tabitha made a strange sound, maybe the most happy sob in the whole history of soppy utterances.

"I missed'o", she sniffed.

"I'm here now", he said soothingly.

"I wanna go, Doctor!"

"We will, Miss Carlyle."

Bradley was enraged to hear that calm statement.

"No", he said, "Nobody will go. Sullivan, this really is the most inconvenient time to come here, do you realise that?"

"Yes. I have the most awesome timing."

"You will have noticed that I have company, yes? That very powerful pokemon here at my side?"

"I can clearly see it. It's droll."

"It's mine, Sullivan. It does what I say."

"Neat."

"Pokemon are fighters! The natural weapons they have! The obedience they show!"

"I fail to be impressed."

"The orbs, Sullivan! The people of their time must've build them to break a pokemon's spirits, I think, and… Why am I telling you, anyway?"

"Mad scientist's monologue?"

"I will leave now, Sullivan. I killed a man today. Do you realise that this can really change someone? They say the first kill is the hardest, and every additional one, well, is just numbers. I am here, very close to your precious lab pet, and I can kill. I have a pokemon that will attack you if I say so. Don't you agree that I have all the advantage?"

"Agreed."

"And you are alone. I am not. I have a pokemon, and that gives me power. You have none, and that makes you just a lone old man."

Sullivan lowered his head. When he spoke, his face remained hidden.

"You are, of course, absolutely right. But, Thomas, do you know what's bad about a long, long monologue to ensure yourself of your power?" He took his hands from his pockets, and Bradley saw that the engineer, too, held a capturing orb. It was one of the new ones. A good made, glistening in the light.

"The really bad thing, Thomas, is that you give anyone listing a lot of time to think. And the time to poke at your stuff. One would have to be a pretty nasty bit of work to do so, of course, but I think you will have realised by now that I am not a nice man."

He tossed the ball lightly at Tabitha, trained by many years of tossing the ball with Pete. It snapped open with a metallic sound.

"I am sorry, Miss Carlyle. Please trust me", Sullivan said.

"I do…", was the last thing Tabitha said before the lightning hit her. The straps made a dull sound as she was pulled into the capturing device, this time without any signs of resistance. With one step the engineer was next to Bradley and scooped the pokemon-ball up. He was moving with such calmness that neither the Librarian nor his ghost even tried to stop him.

"So", Sullivan said, stepping back and pocketing the orb, "And all of a sudden you have lost one threat."

Bradley's face was white.

"You can't do that!", he said, offended beyond reason, "That… you took my orbs!"

"Yes, you could say that I got you by the balls." Sullivan had the decency to look a bit embarrassed at the feeble pun.

"_You took my stuff!_"

"Yes", said the engineer and reached down to shoulder the gym back, "I am taking everything. Thomas, this is over. Calm down, recall your pokemon, and…"

"Voice of reason, from you? Still? Now? _Here_?"

"Worth a try, no? Thomas, do you even realise what you did? The whole section's on fire, and nobody seems to know how to extinguish the flames. They are evacuating already. I think Warrington will be a wee bit vexed. I know I am."

He turned, having made his point, and carefully patted the pocket containing Tabitha's orb. He was aware that, from now on, he would never be able to see the world in the same way. Having a human- a mostly human- being transferred into a very small sphere and being able to keep it in your pocket could do that to you. A world where you could do that to people was not a world he wished to be part of.

"You don't really expect me to let you walk away now, Andrew."

"I don't think you'll have that great many options", said Sullivan. Pete, who had recovered most of his breath, and their personal security guard appeared in the doorframe. "You know, I wasn't alone. Backup's important. You got a pokemon, all right, but we have a scared man with a gun, and we are not afraid to use him. This is not about you killing any more, Thomas. It's about you getting shot at."

Bradley ran his tongue across dry lips. He glanced at the Haunter. Would it be vulnerable to a bullet? And would… no, that thought wasn't even worth finishing. The guard _would_ shoot. Either at the Haunter, or at him. And he would be fully justified. Bradley tensed.

"But… Sullivan, no, wait. Don't you see… I can't turn in now. I have risked so much, and I had everything! You wouldn't take that away from me now, would you?"

He watched the three men watching him watching them. At his side, the Haunter idly purred and started to lick its hands.

"Thomas, we've all made mistakes, and due to some… carelessness on your behalf, we're knee-deep in the thick of it, at the shores of hell, with an inferno around us, _and I am carrying a woman in my pocket_. This is already a disgrace, you know?", Sullivan said softly. "It proves that good intentions really can lead to quite some disaster. In all fairness, we both did pretty silly things. But you messed up. You wanted to be clever and messed up. You touched my stuff first. Without you, we wouldn't be standing here."

"But without me messing up I wouldn't have a pokemon either."

"And what use has it been to you? You treat it badly already."

"It will still protect me!", shouted Bradley.

Three men outnumbering one man have a certain disadvantage: They are individuals, and will evaluate the situation from their personal point of view. When they know each other well, this will not be too much of a problem- Pete had kept in the background, allowing his senior to steer the conversation. But the guard was tense, even more tense than Bradley. When the Librarian spat out the last sentence, he flinched. A man with a gun who is under great tension will, invariably, flinch first and then shoot out of reflex.

The gunshot boomed and caused that exquisite moment of extended time that people under stress occasionally mention. Things slow down. This is just a trick of the mind, really, because the human brain can take in a lot of information at once but will only reveal all the details later. Since it takes long to describe these details, people afterwards feel that something that happened within a second went on for hours.

What really happened was this: The guard, who had aimed for the floating Haunter, was suddenly hit by a dark, purple ball of ghost fire. Cold fire that burned without heat, without smoke, and that left no trace of the man when it eventually ran out of things to burn.

While the guard burned, however, he had time enough to fire another bullet, totally missing the pokemon again, but neatly penetrating Andrew Sullivan's shoulder. The scientist fell with one astonished grunt, and Pete made haste to reach him, caught him clumsily and collapsed, barely cushioning his senior's fall. The capturing orb rolled from the man's pocket, clicking on the floor like a very large marble.

The Haunter cackled menacingly and dashed forward, but Bradley shouted a short command.

"No", he ordered, "We will merely leave."

Bradley shouldered his- yes, now again it was his- bag, beckoned at the pokemon and made haste.

So he had won in the end.


	24. Chapter 24: Go, Ariados

**Go, Ariados**

"It's really nothing, Pete, it just stings a little… Where's Thomas gone?" Sullivan did his best to impress his assistant with being tough as a gnarled oak. It didn't take much effort, Pete already was in awe of the man. But not as much as Tabitha, he thought. Sullivan had gently twisted and tapped the capturing orb and had allowed her to return to her proper size and shape. She was crouching on the floor, leaning over the elderly man. Her fingers gently stroked his shoulders. Her back legs, with a mind of their own, did the same. Her eyes were shiny with tears.

"He hurt you", she said softly, "You just wanted to be good and he hurt you…"

"It wasn't him", Sullivan grunted, "It was an accident. And I am not hurt very much, Miss Carlyle, so please stop cuddling me. It feels a bit inappropriate."

"You saved me! You came back and saved me and were brave! You are the best supervisor there is!", the girl insisted, still comforting him.

She has totally turned, Pete realised, she's bound now, bound by faith. My senior, a married man of fifty-something, has captured her and made her his… pocket monster. He shuddered at the sound of his thought.

"I am not even your supervisor anymore. Listen, Miss Carlyle, I fear that the orb has some effect on you that is very, very unfortunate. You need to remember that you are human, is that understood? You are not pokemon enough to worship me or anything, agreed?"

"Arrri", she chuckled playfully.

"Tabby, we're leaving now. I need you to help me with the Doc. Do you understand what I am saying?", Pete took over. He gently helped the man to his feet. "Need support?", he asked.

"Says the man with the glass leg", Sullivan scoffed, but he gratefully leaned against Pete and steadied himself. Tabitha obediently supported his other side, her eyes never leaving the man. Clumsily, they made their way to the elevator. Pete pushed the buttons. The doors slid open. The shaft was empty, and filled with cold flames. Pete cursed.

"Stairs, then, it's not too far."

"This whole section will burn, I figure", said Sullivan dreamily, "Those flames are from below. Damned, I had my best tie in my locker."

"Do you want it, I can go", Tabitha offered.

"Just joking, Miss Carlyle, just joking." Sullivan felt the weight of the capturing orb in his pocket and decided that this was technology that should never have been made. But then again, he himself had made a creature that responded to it. Who was the bigger bastard? He sighed, and slipped, almost toppling Pete over.

Tabitha gently let go of the man and crouched in front of the elevator shaft. She thought she had seen something moving. Her mandibles spread, and she gave an angry hiss… "riiiii…." and jumped back.

"That thing's in there, burning! That ghostee nasty thing!", she cried.

"Bradley wants to play it safe, then", nodded Sullivan, "Why destroy one section of a building when you can totally wreck it. Wow. That'll take him some time."

"Doc, _we_ are still in the building", Pete said nervously. Calm was only of so much use when you were in a potential barbecue. Was it a barbecue when it burned cold?

"That Haunter", Tabitha said firmly, "I wanna fight it."

"Miss Carlyle, please do me a favour, yes?"

"Sure, ya! What?"

"Shut your mouth."

"Bu…"

"No _buts_, no _bus_, not even a _b_, okay? No letter of the alphabet is to leave your mouth, right? You are not yourself." Sullivan shook his head, angry- mostly angry at himself.

"Tabby, that thing's tossing freaky fireballs", Pete supported him, "What we do is, we act clever and try the stairs and _make haste_ and get away from here safely before we burn. Or freeze, or whatever."

They got up again, steadied Sullivan between them, and made haste to try the stairs. After merely a few seconds, the Haunter emerged from a wall and playfully scratched its chin. This was fun. The only thing was this… hunger. It had not eaten properly for ages, and as a predator it found it hard to resist the shape of prey. It gently turned. It had been ordered to flame the building. Its flames didn't burn for long, and it was exhausting to hurl ghost balls all the time, but its owner had made a clear order. The Haunter yearned to follow that order and please its owner- an owner who allowed it so much destruction was a blessing.

The ghost flickered slightly and made its way to the wall, where it stopped. It thought. Fading took power. Ghost balls took power. It would need to fade later, when it had inflamed the building. Better to save some energy, then.

Or, even better, get some new energy. Its owner had allowed it to burn that man with the boom-stick. And he had ordered it to eat the Ariados. Ariados were tasty. There wasn't much meat in them, but sweet juices and runny bits.

It could kill, yes, kill the humans and leave the Ariados owner-less, and then feed on it. A whole Ariados. That would make it strong enough to fulfil its owner's orders.

Yes. It was perfectly okay to _disobey_ its commands in order to be _better able_ to follow them. It was a complex chain of thoughts, but the Haunter found no fault in it. And the prey was still in sight. It lunged.

Pete felt a chill as the Haunter flew into his back, head first, and knocked him over. Sullivan, without his assistant's support, slunk to the side, dragging Tabitha with him. They landed in one awkward, tangled heap, the Haunter dashing past them.

But the few seconds the ghost pokemon needed to describe an arch in the air and face its prey again were more than enough time for Tabitha to untangle herself. A bug on its back is a pitiful sight. Spiders have it easier because they are more flexible. But Ariados were actually designed to take advantage of such a position. She had legs at the back, and Tabitha was really no longer able to distinguish between rational thought and instinct. She flung herself forward, towards the ghost, somersaulted and landed lightly, hands spread in front of her, legs spread behind her, head lowered. She felt the shiver as her back legs rose and shook, rattling like the dry skin on a snake's tail. She was a predator too. She understood that looking dangerous was as important as being able to fight, and she could do _both_.

She clenched her fists. This made her hands useless, but it allowed her to balance herself on the pointy chitin bits that extended her limbs. With some stretching, she could keep herself in a perfect, poised position. She arched her back, and swayed gently. Yes. This was good, she could easily dash into every direction, she felt, and her horn was clearly visible now. It wasn't especially large, but it was a horn. A pointy sharp bit that belongs to you is never scoffed at in a fight.

She tilted her head and stared at the ghost pokemon that had just finished its arc in the air, and was facing them now.

It faced the Ariados, no longer bound and helpless, but ready to defend itself. Valid prey, yes! The Haunter liked that.

Tabitha pointed towards Sullivan and Pete with her head, spread her mandibles and hissed a single statement into the world.

"Rrrrrriad…" _They are mine_. Pete understood the tinny cry without fail. So did Sullivan.

"Miss Carlyle, no…"

The Haunter hesitated for just a second, then it howled and dashed forward. Tabitha, all limbs moving in a disconcertingly spider-like rhythm, did the same. When the Haunter tried to sweep over her, her back legs snapped forward, snatched the ghost out of the air and smacked it into the ground with a dull thud. Her fists followed quickly, sharp chitin was thrust towards the pokemon's evil face…

It faded, grinning, and allowed itself to sink into the ground. Tabitha clawed at the floor, snarling a curse. She instantly went back on all four major limbs and made a jump to the side when the Haunter reappeared… right behind her. All around it, ghost balls were forming.

Sneaky thing.

Tabitha chuckled, and twisted, and her back legs pushed her up, sideways, and, yes… sure, fingers were not able to scale a wall. They were not Ariados' fingers. But those chitin tips with their rough, slightly porous surface… they did the trick. She clung to the wall, trembling like a leaf, then, hand over leg, she went for the ceiling. Her movements were clumsy, she wasn't used to being upside down, but the Haunter seemed a bit weakened itself and allowed her to get a good position to jump at it. She dropped, fell, turned, grabbed at the thing with hands and back legs and thrust her face into the surprisingly soft belly. Her horn pierced its skin.

It had skin. _Good_.

Skin could be torn. Skin was _tasty_.

She sunk her teeth into the foul material that made a Haunter's body. Her mandibles snapped shut, clamping down into the Haunter, and there was a painful pulsing just under her cheeks. Her head throbbed.

Liquid. Poison. Ariados had poison. She was an Ariados. She had poison. She was pumping poison into the ghost pokemon. She felt cold hands touching her. She could not see, her face was buried in stinking, soft ghost. It was grabbing at her, scratching.

Struggling.

Weakening.

Stopping.

She forced her pincers and horn out of the Haunter, tearing its skin. It trashed, but its hands were fading away, and the evil triangular eyes had lost their glow.

She spat, and from under her mandibles, a stringy ribbon of webbing hit the pokemon and glued it to the ground.

She swallowed, her mouth still tasting of ghost, her heart pounding, her lungs doing one hell of a job in her chest.

She turned around, sticky purple blood all over her face, eyes sparkling with pride. She had won and protected her owner. She had been good.

"Arria-dos", she chuckled, waiting to be patted on the head.


	25. Chapter 25: A New Tabitha

**A New Tabitha**

The sprawling complex of Silph Corporation did, obviously, not burn down to the ground. That much destruction was beyond the powers of one single pokemon. The fire brigade had a hard time taming the eerie flames the Haunter had left, but apart from the lower west wing, there was not too much damage, and eventually the flames faded away, leaving just a strange smell of marsh gas that mixed with London's smog and finally evaporated. The basement did collapse, and the west wing was ruined indeed, but that was it, really. And there were hardly any casualties. It didn't take Silph too much money to convince people that nothing at all had happened.

Because there were clearly was no signs of terrorism, a rival company, spies, or aliens, it surely had been an accident. Circuits failing, the sprinklers and fire alarms not responding, something like that. Stranger things happened each day.

The public mind lost interest hardly two days after the fire, and it was barely worth the news when Silph announced that the west wing would be rebuild to house an arboretum. Crossbreeding some rare plants really was not interesting at all, as long as they were not alien plants.

Some weeks after the fire in the west wing, however, six funerals took place. They clearly were not connected to the events of that certain night, and most of them went completely unnoticed. They were all rather sparse, and rumour had it that six rather well-trained security guards had fallen prey to a monster that roamed the basements of Silph Corporation. As an urban legend, it was just the right amount of totally tasteless, totally unbelievable, and totally true.

The morning after the fire, Warrington's secretary made an offer to pay someone a few dollars to bring flowers to the widow Sullivan, and some more dollars to tell her that she actually _was_ a widow. Even the owner of Silph could not really deliver this punch line. It was innately unfunny. There was a general shuffling of feet.

But some young guard who had some free time on his hands volunteered when the staff was feverishly looking for anyone to bring a bunch of roses to an elderly lady.

Gregory walked the few minutes to Sullivan's house in deep thought. He knew a bit more about the fire than most of the staff, and he did not believe what everyone else said: That they had found Sullivan's tattered coat and shirt, but nothing else. You knew a man was in a fire and found nothing but a bit of clothing, so he had to be devoured by the flames?

No fire fighter would believe such a heap of bullshit, but would have to agree that it could be true. Yes- highly unlikely, but it could happen. But Gregory had heard and seen a bit too much. The fire had left no ashes, for example. No scorches. It was as if it had been a fire without heat and smoke. He remembered the fractured bits Bradley had quoted from his wretched little book. In a world where spiders had their legs on the back, smokeless fire was pretty easy to believe in.

He was aware, though, that sometimes life likes to rehearse some little cliché, and maybe Sullivan had really died in the flames. So he took a short moment to compose himself before he knocked, and tried his best not to stare when, after a while, an elderly woman in a wheelchair opened. She had no legs, and wore a thick blanket to cover the stumps. He cleared his throat, and reminded himself that maybe she would laugh at his news.

"Er, Mrs. Sullivan? You are Andrew Sullivan's wife?"

"That is correct, young man. You work for Silph? Then we are co-workers, in a way. Would you like to come in?"

"I, er, come on behalf of Mister Warrington."

"He sent me an e-mail already."

"Oh? Ah, he did?"

She blinked her eyes. There was a slight sparkle that could have been a tear.

"What is your name, young man?"

"Er, Hayes, madam. Gregory."

"Ah. And tell me, Mr. Hayes, would you stomp on a spider if you saw one?"

This time, she very clearly winked. Gregory felt a great relief.

"No, madam."

"And if it were a very large one? They can scare some people, you know, when they are all large."

"Still negative, madam. I've met some mighty fine spiders."

He must have passed some sort of test, obviously, and hoped that what he thought was true was, indeed, true. The now-officially-widow nodded happily.

"How charming. Then please, come in. I shall make some tea, and you are to tell me the big lie Warrington seems to take for a fact. We shall compare your version to the one in his mail, yes? I enjoy a good laugh, you know?"

"It would be a pleasure", said Gregory, returning her smile, and followed her in.

When Gregory returned from the poor widow an hour later, he carefully asked his way around the tangled structure of Silph until he found the most stupid, well-paid, remote person who was able to sign his quitting papers. He made a spirited speech about a dead uncle, a small pension, a house in the woods and possibly a small dog, too. He signed his papers and left Silph forever that very evening. On the way to his car, he absolutely accidentally failed to see an elderly nurse, who was so clearly offended by this lack of manners that she spontaneously agreed to have him driving her home.

Home, in their very special case, meant Birmingham, where Gregory did some financial transactions on Mrs. Sullivan's behalf.

Andrew Sullivan had a real man's hobby room. It had everything- a small refrigerator, shelves full of obscure little tinker toys, even a small model railroad. On a makeshift desk with mismatches legs, a partly assembled model ship stood next to a large bottle. On the bottleneck there was a sticky note: D_oes Not Actually Work! _There was the smell of sawdust and oil. One small window allowed a pale sun to play on tools and assorted junk.

It was the kind of room someone who uses very complicated tools to manipulate very small things regularly visits, just to remember himself that with some patience, even the devices to splice genes have, somewhere, a hammer and a screwdriver in their pedigree.

Andrew Sullivan carefully placed the capturing orb on the table, displacing the model ship and carelessly tossing the bottle aside. He stared at the orb as if the device was actively sneering at him. Pete sat down and rested his head in his hands. It had been a hard days night indeed.

"So…", sighed the ex-engineer, "she fights like an animal, she displays pokemon combat behaviour, and she actually attempted to eat a ghost."

"I think it was the stress. She snapped. Who wouldn't have?"

"Shall I repeat my summary, Pete? That wasn't human behaviour!"

"She did it to defend her owner, Doc."

"Yes, that's the next thing. I can't own a human."

"You do own a pokemon."

"Ridiculous. You know what? I don't! I don't want to."

He made an angry pause.

"These orb things", Sullivan said, "are inhuman."

"They were never intended to be used on humans, I think."

"Yes, and you know Scientific Rule 34b, right?"

"Always use a name with more than two syllables?"

"No matter what its original use, any harmless device will eventually be abused."

"Yeah, that one. Yes, I think it's true. Someone always will think just like Bradley."

Sullivan gently touched the orb, and it snapped open. Tabitha appeared in a flashing shape of red energy and formed right at Sullivan's side. She remained motionless, watching him intently, not saying a word but scanning the room. If she wondered where she was or how she'd got there, it didn't show.

"That", Sullivan said, and actually pointed, "is no longer Miss Carlyle. She has not yet said something charming, and she has not mentioned tentacles."

"Pokemon. She's yours now, Doc. The orb really must have an effect. As long as it is used on pokemon, it's a useful effect. Something like a taming aid."

"No. This is not how an animal should be treated. Having a machine that forces and breaks it into obedience?"

"It is only one factor, right? The orbs are just one puzzle piece, one factor of many." Pete waved the Gladiator's Journey- the only thing they had been able to snatch away from Bradley. That and one strange little blue stone with a teardrop engraved into it. Tabitha had eagerly offered, in English that got more fractured by the minute, to return into the building and get more. She had been doggishly brave indeed. The way she had carried her supervisor… animal, Pete thought. There was only pet loyalty left of a cheerful, rather innocent and quite independent woman.

"One factor, but a major one. An artificial one!", snapped his senior.

"Pokemon seem to enjoy being owned, though."

"What can we do, Pete?"

"I don't know, Doc. I know what we can't do: Stay here. When we stay, Silph will sooner or later find us. They will. I don't think I'll have to draw you a picture what'll happen when they find us. Or Tabby."

"tah-by", giggled the girl, amused at the sound of the name. Sullivan looked as if he wanted to slap her across the face. He stoop up, and searched his workbenches for something.

"This stops now, Miss Carlyle", he rumbled, and took a large hammer.

He sat down.

He took the capturing orb.

"Do you see this? Do you see this fancy little ball here? Well, Miss Carlyle, then watch my magic trick!"

He brought the hammer down on the orb. There was a crunch, and the device broke. The table sagged, too, the blow had been so hard. A faint glow escaped from the capturing device. Tabitha blinked, and then clutched at her face.

"Ow! Argh, oh man! That… stings!", she moaned. Then she looked up at Andrew Sullivan, and her eyes softened.

"Thank you", she said, her voice perfectly normal.


End file.
